Amazon announces new, smaller Echo - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/27/16372578/new-amazon-echo-speaker-announced-price-release-date-2017 <comment><USER4> I must be dumb but in today's world of the big 4 spying on you all day long, I'm trying to kick out voice assistants, not bring more in. After Google Now, my voice control needs are done and someone said enough is as good as a feast.

Now when you get Mrs. Roddenberry's TTS voice powering a smart home, we may have to revisit.

<comment><USER5> These devices all ride on your own personal network. Their traffic is easy to monitor for timing and size of the data transmitted outward. If you are worried about spying you might put a piece of tape over your webcam, but I can't say I have heard of anyone physically disabling their laptop's microphone. These voice assistants are basically the same security threat as those open microphones on your laptop. Both of them are still less dangerous than a smartphone that has its own network connection and can more easily hide its spying.

<comment><USER6> Many people physically disable their laptops microphone. Some people in my office do and I think the most famous case is Zuckerberg.

[https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/mark- zuc...](https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/mark-zuckerberg- tapes-macbook-camera-mic-2.jpg?quality=98&strip=all&w=782)

<comment><USER7> The difference being someone might actually care about what Zuckerberg is saying.

<comment><USER6> And? I was simply refuting the comment "..I can't say I have heard of anyone physically disabling their laptop's microphone". I know people who do this, not just Zuckerberg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'll be interesting to see how this compares with the Google Home Mini ([http://www.droid-life.com/2017/09/19/google-home-mini- exclus...](http://www.droid-life.com/2017/09/19/google-home-mini-exclusive/)). For me the ideal size would be invisible or something I can tape to the inside top of my entertainment center.

</comment><comment><USER8> The key feature that would make me get a set of these, or competing devices, is independent voice commands per device. For example, I'd like to be able to have one in each bedroom and say "turn off the lights" and have it only affect that room. The last time I looked there wasn't a product on the market that supported this.

<comment><USER9> Echo + Hue totally does this. Though, you have to say "Turn off the bedroom lights." if you just want the bedroom. "Turn off the lights" will turn off all the lights.

BTW- it's magic, amazing and too expensive. But if you're dumb and like geeky tech things, it's pretty rad.

<comment><USER10> To clarify the other reply and OP's comment, I think he wants to say "turn off the lights" to the Echo he has in the bedroom, and have it know to turn off _just_ the bedroom lights. Ditto for the one in the living room, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Serious Question; Is Google ever going to get out of catch-up mode in this department?

<comment><USER12> Why would they waste their time? They already have a speech recognition platform, it's called android.

Amazon is wasting money on hardware because they missed out on mobile and with echos they're hoping to be there when the NLP catches up.

<comment><USER13> Nah, these are definitely their own platform. Just ask anyone that owns one - they don't use it as a phone substitute. Plus, it would be another method for Google to bring iPhone users into the fold.

I know plenty of friends and relatives with an Alexa, but a lot less with a Google Home. I think Google needs to make an equivalent of the Echo Dot - <USER2> small, cheap device that people can put in multiple rooms.

<comment><USER12> I'm guessing you either live in the bay area/seattle or work at amazon.

I don't know anyone in new york who uses an echo. I've heard of a few people who got one when it came out but they all stopped using it after a day or 2.

Google will be the winner the personal assistant market because they have billions of people who use android, maps, gmail, drive, search, calendar, translate etc. If we ever switch to conversational interfaces they could be in the position to really hurt Amazon.

<comment><USER13> I live in New York, so, no.

While I agree that Google is in a stronger position to win the eventual personal assistant battle, I disagree with your original proposition that it'll be done through Android phones.

I think the potential for voice assistants is overhyped, but there _is_ still potential there, and you can't achieve the same thing with a phone that's in your pocket/bag/whatever. Ask someone that uses one before you dismiss the product category entirely.

<comment><USER12> I'd love to hear what the use cases are besides ordering stuff from amazon.

I could think of maybe using alexa to control my IoT devices (I don't own any) but even then I'd be more interested in controlling them when I'm not home.

If there's a market for these devices it's as a replacement for premium speakers like sonos / bose. Apple seems to be going in that direction with the homepod and it has a great shot at dominating because most of the consumers in that market already own other apple products.

My phone is next to me 99% of the time. Google knows when my meetings are, where I'm flying next week and who I talk to. If there is a shift to voice it will probably be because of another wearable device (like airpods or glasses).

<comment><USER13> Use cases

\- controlling IoT devices, like lights, which you control when you are at home

\- playing music, podcasts

\- playing videos (via Chromecast/whatever)

\- setting alarms

\- asking simple questions

\- checking weather

I could go on. You're saying "if there is a market for these devices" as if there isn't already a demonstrated market. Amazon is selling a ton of them! Your phone is a personal device, while an Echo is used by a household. Their use cases are very different.

Again, I get that this might not be a good device _for you_. But it's silly to say there are no uses beyond ordering stuff from Amazon, because people use them for a lot of stuff every single day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Haha what is a bass tweeter tho

<comment><USER15> Yes, I was guessing they meant to say it had dedicated bass AND tweeter (which is presumably only noteworthy given the smaller size, as the old Echo has both[1] - and the Dot doesn't [2]).

1: [https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953)

2: [https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Dot+Teardown/613...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Dot+Teardown/61304)

<comment><USER16> Alternatively, it could be a full range driver, but more unlikely giving the phrasing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was hoping by "smaller Echo" they meant "smaller than the Dot".

Also, Alexa is most useful in a car and I'm still disappointed that there's no apparent way to use Alexa for things like turn-by-turn navigation.

<comment><USER18> Uh, why would Alexa be better than Siri or Google esp. since they're likely tied to CarPlay/Android Auto?

The market there is very crowded, I doubt Amazon's looking to disrupt there.

If I were Amazon and wanted to enter the car market, I'd make a decent dash camera based on their work with Echo Show... could possibly disrupt Apple/Google.

<comment><USER17> I just happen to like Alexa for everything else. Why would I _not_ want to put it to use in my car as well?

Besides, I don't own any iOS devices (well, except an iPhone 3GS sitting in a closet), so Siri's out of the question. It'd be nice if I wasn't tied to one other choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To those who lack the empathy to understand how these devices might be useful to anyone, it's incredibly useful to be able to:

\- hands-free set multiple timers while cooking \- set timers for kids to give them structured assignments (clean your room, you have 10 minutes, etc.) \- have ambient music going in the home that any of the kids can participate in as they please (we have 4) \- sound machines as sleep aids \- lamps on/off in the living room on schedule and by voice command

I could go on but I think I get my point across. Households with kids get a lot of use out of these things.

<comment> King-Aaron Can these devices tie in to existing hi-fi systems (either via bluetooth, or physical outputs)? Or are you tied to the teeny-tiny internal speaker for your music?

(Edit, never mind. Commented before reading the article like a pleb - <USER3> answer to my own question appears to be yes)

<comment><USER19> We have both the echo and echo dots. The echo needs no help making enough sound to fill our kitchen/living room. The dot in our bedroom is hooked up to some old Klipsch 2.1 PC speakers. For the kids, the internal speaker on those is pleeeenty ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any open source version of an IoT "hub"? Not necessarily voice control but a FOSS alternative to HomeKit, Google Home and this?

</comment><comment><USER21> I just want a JBL speaker with bass and Google Assistant with a battery.

</comment><comment><USER22> Big Brother is always listening.

Listening in on what you're doing is so valuable they can offer free phone calls and free music.

<comment><USER23> > so valuable

Some poor MBA SOB probably already ran a spreadsheet on that.

Actually, probably a bunch of poor MBA SOBs, and the results are all over the map, so there's some mana raining down from the optimists.

One of these days they'll converge on a lower valuation, and turn off the tap. Or shrug and say, what the heck, the free stuff ain't worth much either, and it keeps the rioting down ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Playing new, smaller youtubes

</comment><comment><USER25> am I the only one who's still convinced these things are useless

<comment><USER26> Add me too..they are Useless. Period.

<comment><USER27> As with everything it depends on the person. I find mine quite useful thanks. I also find my smart watch to be a critical part of my day but I don't tell everyone they are a must have. Everyone has their own use cases.</comment></comment></comment>


OpenDroneMap – Simple Images into 3D - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/ODM/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> It would be nice to know how this compares with other open source and commercial photogrammetric offerings.

Free:

\- AliceVision [https://alicevision.github.io/](https://alicevision.github.io/)

\- Colmap [https://colmap.github.io/](https://colmap.github.io/)

\- etc.

Commercial:

\- Agisoft Metashape (formerly Photoscan) [https://www.agisoft.com/](https://www.agisoft.com/)

\- Zephyr 3D [https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-pro-3d-models-from- photos/](https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-pro-3d-models-from-photos/)

\- Drone deploy [https://www.dronedeploy.com/](https://www.dronedeploy.com/) \- etc etc etc

See also:

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

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

<comment><USER3> We are using ODM for generating orthomosaic photos and it produced better results than the commercial offerings we have seen (In some cases MUCH better). Note this did require us to tweak the settings some but overall it was pretty easy process.

Things of Note: 1) ODM didn't quite scale as well to very large number of photos. (I think this may have been fixed now). 2) Our use case was pretty brutal. ~1 cm resolution photos of a mostly uniform row crop fields. Some of the other tools were really bad at not rotating the rows 90 deg in parts of the field. 3) I was in on the POC and selection process but not the production runs so I'm not sure how things have changed over the last year. 4) Some of the comparisons where with different photos (Looking at a custom full path) 5) We didn't look at 3d much at all, but it was pretty cool to be able to see 3d tractor tire marks across and freshly planted field. The 3d quality would really fall off at the edges when there was less overlap. I think it was only good in relative hight as well but our tests were very flat.

<comment><USER4> One of its dependencies, OpenSfM, does a lot of the heavy lifting with regard to generating things like HOG descriptors (since SIFT = $IFT)

That project used to have a bug with their multithreading implementation where if your photo sets got too big children threads would terminate but fail to get reaped and your heap size would just continue to grow until things kaboomed at the SfM phase.

Not entirely their fault though as it stemmed from a deeper issue with Python stdlib's pool implementation.

Back then, with certain photosets I would literally run OOM on my homelab which was equipped with 128 GB DDR4

Should be fixed by now though.

You wouldn't happen to work for a small MPLS based startup would you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This morning I was watching a "video editing" youtube video where he made a 3D terrain object to load into Davinci Resolve (commercial but free for personal use), and track to the palm of his hand so it looked like the terrain was floating above his palm.

He used [http://terrain.party/](http://terrain.party/) to get height information as an image (lighter colors are high, darker are low), then a script scrape together images from Google Maps, which he transformed using the height information.

At that point he was using a GUI to view the resulting 3D object and manipulate the camera and lighting. Blew my mind.

I followed it part of the way, but got stuck with getting the google images. He was doing a valley close to an object recognizable from space close to the coast, I was trying to find the cabin we stayed at last weekend in rural Colorado.

Pretty mindblowing what you can do with free video editing software today.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP6wVajeI_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP6wVajeI_M)

<comment><USER6> That's a really roundabout way to do that though... He's basically taking free height data, converting it to a raster image, and then approximating it in the editor (which tries to convert the raster heightmap back to a proper map). The actual satellite imagery might be harder to (legally) get (and he basically suggests removing the copyright notices in the video).

It's cool that it works, but it's also the "wrong" way to go about it considering all the tools around to work with open, free GIS data.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. I was stuck at getting the correct images for the area I had the height map for. My plan was to use the NAIP images, which I have sitting here on one of my computers, processed, and is free.

But, I ran into some weirdness with Davinci Resolve where it was getting "Media Unavailable" for some frames of the video. Once I went down that rabbit hole, I was just tired of that video and wanted it done. So I didn't add a spinning 3D map of the area, just added some titles and music and called it a day.

Agree that it's not cool to remove copyright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting point: while the software is free, the web interface (webodm) seems to have a paid service integrated to process the images in the cloud (webodm lighning [1]). Since resource demands seem quite high (lots of RAM for larger image sets) this looks attractive and seems like a good way to finance an open source project.

1: [https://webodm.net/](https://webodm.net/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I assume this uses GPS data to help with stitching the photos together.

Do drones capture orientation data beyond GPS position (for example, pitch, yaw, gimbal direction)?

I have tried adding motion graphics to some of my drone videos in After Effects but as far as I can tell it discards all of the metadata and infers the camera position based solely on the video frames. This is really slow and imprecise; I've been wondering if there's a plug-in that will use the recorded telemetry from the drone to set the camera orientation.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it uses GPS for that. You can match two partially overlapping images. From the movement of the feature points in the overlapping areas you can calculate your camera orientation, and thus the 3d point cloud of feature points ( or something close to this ). I think it is called structure from movement, the readme links a paper, maybe it's worth reading for you.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, is there a technical reason for not using that extra data to help with the process?

For example, another commenter mentioned

> Some materials don't really contain any surface details that the algorithms > could use to attach feature points to, so they will be blank. Large white > walls and large windows are especially difficult.

Seems like you might be able to position some of these with orientation data from the camera.

<comment><USER10> The GPS data is probably being used as a prior. The GPS metadata is accurate but imprecise, while SFM more precise. GPS is likely used for pose initialization, while SFM is then used to refine the pose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there editors that allow you to manipulate point clouds or 'digital surface models'? (Not sure what those are) I'd like to use something like this to digitize my property and model changes to it (building, landscaping, etc).

<comment><USER12> [https://www.danielgm.net/cc/](https://www.danielgm.net/cc/)

<comment><USER11> Nice! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What kind of image quality would one need to get something useful out of this. Useful : Create a 3d model of a house with surrounding trees, so I can see the effect of those trees on a planned solar installation. Or create a 3d model of a garden to see where the sun and shadow are over the course of the year.

<comment><USER2> The better the photograph, the better the output quality. Photogrammetric output will always have noise. Some materials don't really contain any surface details that the algorithms could use to attach feature points to, so they will be blank. Large white walls and large windows are especially difficult.

Don't crop the photos. Prefer slight underexposition. For each detail you want to capture, have it visible at least in three photos. Capture photos from different position (ie. rather move yourself than just turn the camera) with at least 30% - 50% overlap between photos.

You can find lots of tutorial in the internet. Search term that hits gold is 'photogrammetry tutorial'. For example:

[https://medium.com/realities-io/getting-started-with- photogr...](https://medium.com/realities-io/getting-started-with- photogrammetry-d0a6ee40cb72)

If you just want to try out the technique, I suggest you download the free test version of Zephyr 3D. You can just give it a bunch of photos and it does a fairly sane ops with the default options.

[https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-pro-3d-models-from- photos/](https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-pro-3d-models-from-photos/)

If you like it, you can start experimenting with free and commercial tools including the one in the topic of this thread (see my other post in this thread for some other photogrammetric tools).

If you have a large set of photos you will start to need a fairly beefy computer with tens of gigs of RAM the least. But, you can get pretty nice results for e.g. just a single house with just a regular modern desktop PC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Used this pretty extensively, and followed their dev branches. FWIW if you want quality results the best option is Agisoft, on a GPU machine w/ some custom python to automate.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, ODM was slightly better quality than Photoscan in our tests. We only tested orthomosaics but ODM had less error to our ground control points (note we didn't feed the givens into these tests) and less aberrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone have any experience with the ZED camera? They claim they can generate 3d maps down to 1cm resolution without LIDAR using these kinds of methods.

<comment><USER10> The ZED camera works by using two high-resolution RGB camera, finding matching points between the two, and using that to calculate depth. Because they are using high-resolution RGB cameras, they can generate very high resolution depth maps. However, this is also their main drawback; with just RGB images, depth map calculation will fail on texture-poor surfaces, such as plain white walls, because it's very difficult to match points.

They are fundamentally performing photogrammetry with two cameras at a fixed distance.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can solve this edge case using a light source, with a method called "structured light": [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured- light_3D_scanner](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured-light_3D_scanner)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> this might be off-topic, but anyone know a good software for indoor use? i.e turning indoor images into indoor 3D models.</comment>


Possibly the Most Realistic Artificial Skylight - <AUTHOR> http://architizer.com/blog/let-there-be-light-coelux/

<comment><USER2> Looks great, but it costs £40,000 and needs one metre of space above the ceiling. I don't think I'll be buying one anytime soon. If you designed the building around it though, that might be a different story.

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks impressive, but I wonder what the power requirements are? What is this in equivalent LED bulbs or cost per year?</comment>


Mysterious flesh-eating bacteria is raging in Australia - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/australian-experts-freaked-by-upsurge-in-mysterious-flesh-eating-bacteria/ <comment><USER2> "Palm-sized ulcers"... No kidding, Australia does every horror bigger than the rest of us.

Flesh-eating bacteria falls within the same category of those brain amoebas you occasionally hear about that can kill you just because you were in some body of water. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to stick to well- chlorinated swimming pools. Deadly threats you can't see and all. The sort of fear-inducing stuff the media loves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and the scary thing is no one even knows what's causing this. Insects? Mining too greedily? Warming temps?</comment></comment>


Open source: Farmers vs. Nomads - <AUTHOR> http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/2008/05/nomadism-open-s.html

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that read that as "Farmers vs. Monads"?

<comment><USER3> In the best of all worlds, this is the best of all possible comments.</comment></comment>


Stubs – a cross-platform dynamic linking mechanism used by Tcl - <AUTHOR> https://tcl.wiki/285 <comment><USER2> Unfortunately the link posted here is wrong, it should be [http://wiki.tcl.tk/285](http://wiki.tcl.tk/285)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tcl.wiki is just an alternative domain name for the wiki introduced after the .tk hijackings of last year (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480729)). For linking purposes it is as good as wiki.tcl.tk, but considering .tk's track record with security, possibly less likely to be hijacked.

<comment><USER2> My mistake, when I tried the original link it was blocked by firewall rules at my place of work and I assumed it didn't work at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Wipeout: Human role in climate change removed from science report - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2018/04/07/wipeout-human-role-in-climate-change-removed-from-science-report_partner/ <comment><USER2> A recent survey from Yale shows "A majority of Americans (63%) say they are "very" or "somewhat" worried about the issue".

So we've got "permission". Let's get to work. I'm excited about putting my efforts into solutions. Here's a few: [http://airminers.org](http://airminers.org)

Yale survey: [http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate- ch...](http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change- american-mind-october-2017/)</comment>


iOS 9 Ad Blocker Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/8/22/crystal-benchmarks

<comment><USER2> The question I have: what's the advertisers' next move after iOS 9 drops?

Feels like there are a few possibilities:

\- Nothing: the impact of users who install these plugins is minor.

\- They sue Apple. Feels like a short game.

\- Try and game the system: multiple domains to serve trackers and ads, etc.

\- They adjust their technology stack to serve fewer ads and reduce page bloat.

\- They put up paywalls.

\- They bet more heavily on things like Facebook or Apple's new News app.

Of the options, #1 and #4 feel like the most likely options long-term. People want free content, which requires _some_ sort of revenue stream. And they don't want to put their futures in the hands of Apple or Facebook.

<comment><USER3> This might be a dumb question, but I am a web publisher and have no idea what you mean about changes to iOS 9. Is there an ad blocker installed automatically or something? What is changing and what does it mean for a publisher like myself who self hosts ads I personally sell without using an ad network?

<comment><USER4> There is a new content blocking API in iOS 9 that makes it possible to write third-party ad-blockers.

Apple isn't writing their own, or pre-installing one, or anything like that. (At least, nothing like that has been publicly discussed, and I'd be very surprised if it was something they did.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems that there are only massive benefits to use a blocker. And a good chunk of the most valuable audience will be gone in a matter of a few weeks... Whatever hurts the advertising industry increases the pressure to find _real_ business models. This is a win-win for everyone.

And whoever cries that is site/app doesn't make enough cash any longer, didn't have something _valuable_ at the first place. No one will bat an eye.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to see some sort of benchmark for what this does to battery life.

</comment><comment><USER7> Would the same benchmark results be evident using AdBlock and AdBlockPlus currently on Chrome? Does anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER8> I would note that you could actually do this on iOS now without a Safari- specific API—the opening-up of VPN APIs in iOS9 means something like an iOS Privoxy could be written quite easily.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if websites dependent on ads will start blocking access from iOS 9 and OS X because of this.

<comment><USER10> Apple has claimed 55% of US mobile browser usage and 10.5% of desktop. And those customers tend to have a much higher socioeconomic status and a proclivity to spend money.

Would you really want to block access to them ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How well it work compared to Weblock?

</comment><comment><USER12> Would like to see this or another tool open sourced so I could install it on my iPhone

<comment><USER13> Apple is providing a new OS service that's relatively easy for devs to use... so yes, there will be plenty of free apps that hook this new service up to existing blocklists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Closed source "ad blocker" is a bad idea.

Your icon is cute, but the stats are unverifiable and therefore you need to change the title.

Unless you've paid to be on YC, in which case carry on.

<comment><USER15> It's just an ad, don't worry about it.</comment></comment>


The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law) - <AUTHOR> http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

<comment><USER3> Sure, but the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the particular charges isn't the issue. Anyone who focuses on 'computer crime' or any of Aaron's pet causes is missing the point. The issue is abuse of power, and why the federal government has so much power in the first place.

Criminals should be a tiny group of antisocial people who deserve serious consequences for their serious actions, with law enforcement enforcing a limited set of laws (rape, murder, etc.) universally - going after every criminal that comes to their attention. Fair and understandable.

Back in reality, most of us have probably innocuously violated some federal law already (Silverstein's Three Felonies a Day has been mentioned a bunch - it's a great book.) Even in cases like Swartz's where his violations were arguably intentional rather than accidental, the penalties are completely disproportionate to the action.

In this system, where we're practically all lawbreakers, the government has the discretion to decide exactly whose lives they want to ruin. In the best case they're enforcing the law selectively in line with their best moral judgement - for example, Al Capone. He was generally suspected to be a bad guy, but no one could _prove_ that he committed any sort of real crime - <USER2> out of the millions of people that cheat on their taxes every year, the government singled him out to prosecute for tax evasion, and then threw the book at him. Maybe jailing him was a good result, but by selecting one man out of a pool of millions of lawbreakers to go after, the government crossed the line from the rule of law to the rule of man. And think of the result when the government's initial instinct about a person's "good guy" vs. "bad guy" status is wrong!

In this system, the nightmare is the malicious prosecutor, one that's not even attempting to "do what's right" but instead is selecting cases to prosecute for personal motivations - political advancement, personal causes, etc. People who are initially targeted for federal prosecution but somehow 'escape' are frequently recharged for something else - for example, the hapless fuel-cell entrepreneur Krister Evertson. That's what it sounds like happened to Aaron Swartz - thanks to the previous federal investigation into PACER, when he popped up again the federal government was delighted to go after him with both barrels, for reasons having nothing to do with MIT or JSTOR. Even if PACER wasn't an influence, going after Swartz instead of modern Al Capones shows that the arbitrary rule of man we've got in place of a real legal system is working pretty damn poorly.

The way to solve this problem, ultimately, would be to dramatically shrink the size of criminal federal law - ideally by limiting what can be declared criminal in the constitution, since we certainly can't rely on the legislative branch's sense of justice. This will never happen, at least not until this system is torn down and another is constructed (yeah, you scoff, but historically this does happen from time to time). In the meantime, we might as well find legal ways to make being a prosecutor politically unrewarding, and look for incremental reform where we can find it.

<comment><USER4> The whole "we each innocuously violate several federal laws ever day!" angle is a total red herring. This isn't an instance of someone being charged for actions which nobody thinks should constitute a serious crime.

Go up to your mother and tell her a story that involves someone breaking into restricted closet at MIT, plugging into their network, evading electronic attempts to stop him, and downloading millions of scientific articles that normally are sold for a fee. If your mother is anything like mine, she won't be able to fathom why anyone would do something like this unless he were up to no good.

Swartz did not innocuously do anything. He willfully violated laws designed to proscribe exactly the conduct he was engaged in, conduct that to your average person smacks of criminal activity. Legislators, who think more like my mother than they think like you or me, intended to prohibit Swartz's exact conduct. The prosecutor here was doing exactly what my mother or my Congressman would consider the right course of action in such a situation.

At the end of the day you have to tackle the real problem, which is this: my mother understands the difference between joy riding and grand theft auto. That's within the wheel house of her experience. People interested in "information freedom" or even just proportionate punishment in these situations need to be able to make a case to my mom about why downloading JSTOR articles on MIT's network isn't the same thing as hacking into Bank of America's servers to steal credit card numbers.

<comment><USER3> The 'several federal laws every day' angle is there to remind each and every one of us that we could be treated like Aaron Swartz, whether we think we're violating a law or not. The federal government prosecutes cases all the time against defendants who had no criminal intent whatsoever.

After telling your mother that story about Swartz, tell her a bunch of other stories about a bunch of other potential federal cases, and then tell her she has the resources to prosecute just a subset of them. Prosecutors are always complaining about not having enough resources, after all. See if she likes the feeling of arbitrarily choosing which of a whole bunch of people get a taste of federal justice, and which go free. Explore the rationale your mother uses to make her decisions. Do political considerations ever come into it? Does settling a grudge? The ability of the defendant to defend himself?

I don't get why you're bringing up 'information freedom' or other red herrings. I'm not particularly interested in that or the rest of Aaron's politics, which were rather far from my own. I'm not even trying to argue that Aaron's actions were harmless (although it's true I don't see any significant harm resulting from them). I'm just stating that the real problem is too many laws on the books, prosecuted selectively by people who don't have to justify why they pursue the cases they choose to pursue and ignore the cases they choose to ignore. Arbitrary power. Rule by man, not by law. Something that threatens every one of us, no matter what we think of Aaron's actions.

<comment><USER5> _The 'several federal laws every day' angle is there to remind each and every one of us that we could be treated like Aaron Swartz, whether we think we're violating a law or not._

You mean "convince", not "remind". You're trying to persuade people here, not remind them of something they already believe. Bear this in mind when trying to refer to what you think "the real problem" is, else you might say things that only sound convincing to people that already share your views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The witch hunt was inevitable due to the sheer emotion we all felt during this tragic event. It is correct to step back and not look at getting one or two attorneys fired - but rather look at the law itself, and reflect on the absolute absurdity of how it can be applied. If the law is the law, and the law says that someone downloading academic papers carries the same punishment as a murderer or rapist, then the law needs to be changed. A fundamental shift needs to take place.

We can take a page from: "Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works"

And follow with: "Dear Attorneys, It's No Longer OK To Not Know All Hacking Isn't Terrorism"

<comment><USER7> I think the attorneys getting fired would be a great first step. After all they hounded Aaron and people like him to send a "message". Let them get sent a "message" in return.

<comment><USER8> Yes, after all, "an eye for an eye" is a great system of justice.

No, they shouldn't be fired for doing their job, regardless of the consequences.

It is a tragedy that Aaron took his life, but nobody can argue that it was an appropriate response to the challenges posed to him.

You can't blame a prosecutor because Aaron reacted violently to them doing his job, just as you can't blame violent video games for Columbine or D&D for kids hurting themselves in the forest with swords.

They are all contributing factors, but it is the core mental illness that is at fault.

<comment><USER9> If the job of the prosecutor is to persecute someone, even after the "victim" resolved their issue with the offender, then they have a shitty job and should just up and quit.

There are better jobs out there: ones that don't destroy the lives of good people.

<comment><USER10> Even good people fuck up. Aaron committed crimes and got himself in trouble. Aaron then killed himself. There are many people who could have done things differently to prevent this from happening but why should we point fingers?

<comment><USER9> JSTOR, the offended party, sorted it all out with Aaron out of court. It was an issue of copyright infringement, not theft, but Ortiz characterised it as such. She decided to pursue it out of some misguided and rabid attempt at sticking Aaron's head on a pike a a warning to others, and to make her CV look good.

There are fingers to point, and they need to be pointed in the right direction.

<comment><USER11> Copyright infringement is theft. At root, all property _is_ intellectual property.

[http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.htm...](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.html)

<comment><USER9> Interesting take, but as with much of Ayn Rand's work, fundamentally flawed. An idea can be had independently. The idea if a computer was independently conceived upon in the UK and in Germany at around the same time. Intellectual Property laws weren't needed to "protect" the idea.

All that I really being said is that the person who comes up with an idea should be properly compensated. You don't need IP laws to do that. Many businesses agree - they file patents for inventions for their employees, and pay them a wage (and possibly a bonus).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing worthy of notice are the "combo" nature of these penalties. For example, he says Computer Fraud is pretty much the same as Wire Fraud. Yet that's a separate count, with more years/fines/numbers, which gives the prosecution a larger Sword of Damocles to hold over someone's head. Why have a separate crime if you are always going to charge both?

Kerr is probably right on the narrow point that if you decided to throw the book at someone you'd hit them with a combo like this (and they later expanded it into a 13-hit combo), and might even be right that this combo is "nothing unusual". We should wait for part two, but the multiplication of an infinite number of federal statutes in combination with prosecutorial discretion looks like the real problem here. We need to trim the sails of these prosecutors in a big way, or at least provide an external check.

For example: they're against jury trials? They want to deny people the right to a jury by depleting their cash? Well, what about a virtual jury? Have a site with all public court documents and filings, like the grand jury indictment. Look at how many years they are pursuing and include bios/faces of the accused, defense, and the prosecutors. Then have people vote up/down as to whether or not they think the punishment fits the crime. Completely non- binding of course, and conceptually separate from the question of innocence/guilt. Include lots of analytics/stats on past convictions and the like. Make money via Amazon affiliate links to books on crime, TV shows, etc. And do SEO so that people found innocent are very clearly marked as such in search result snippets.

Many crimes are salacious so with reasonable graphic design you'd have no problem getting visitors (like the Smoking Gun). The resulting scrutiny of prosecutorial decisions by thousands of people would indeed change the profession, putting a second and more scalable check on them comparable to the press.

<comment><USER13> Key point with regards to your opening paragraph is:

" But the ordinary practice is to charge all the possible offenses committed in the indictment, even if they overlap, and then let the jury sort them out at trial."

There is at least a passable amount of evidence for each of the charges, so naturally the prosecution will maximise the number of possible charges. This prevents the whole case falling through if of the one of the counts fails.

<comment><USER14> So force the prosecution to pick the appropriate charge?

(Or are the prosecutors not versed well enough in the law to know which law/crime is the correct one that was violated?)

What do you think about this: if the prosecutor thinks the big charge might not stick because the evidence is questionable then charge the lesser crime?

Or perhaps (I know many don't like this, especially the government) a separate trial for each charge. Yes, the cost to prosecute goes up (if all charges are going to be charged) and that's why they combine multiple charges into one trial. But psychologically, if the jury see that a person has been charged with 13 crimes then he must be guilty of one or some of them right? If the state had to try each charge separately and the big one didn't stick, then if the state truly thought the next one would stick do that trial.

Our legal/justice system has a flaw and that flaw was to let a few guilty men go free to safe guard and protect innocent men from going to prison.

<comment><USER15> How is a separate trial for each charge different from double jeopardy? Part of the point of having the prosecutor bundle together all the possible charges is so there can be a single trial in which the truth comes out. How are you going to "lock in" the possible set of charges early on in such a way to prevent the prosecution from just digging up one more offense at the end of every trial ensuring the defendant never gets to go on with his/her life?

This tragedy is really bringing out the propensity of us Americans to try and find someone to blame for every bad thing that happens so we can prevent bad things from happening again. Unfortunately, there's a certain level of tragedy in this world that is just random and unavoidable. The hang-wringing isn't doing Aaron or his causes any good, it's just creating new victims and wasting a lot of time.

<comment><USER16> _so there can be a single trial in which the truth comes out._

As a point of order, since trials are incredibly stressful and expensive for the accused, society isn't supposed to use them for "the truth to come out" or "to find out what happened."

The trial is where the state -- having decided internally that a person is guilty and must be punished -- goes to prove its case to a jury of the accused's peers, in an orderly courtroom where only pertinent evidence is allowed.

This probably backs up your point even more -- having multiple trials for the same thing is horrible for the accused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Highlight:

"This is going to be a long post, so here's the summary of my conclusion on the first question: I think the charges against Swartz were based on a fair reading of the law. None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach. All of the charges were based on established caselaw. Indeed, once the decision to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged. This is different from what a lot of people are hearing on the Internets, so I realize this post isn't going to be popular."

(should have been in the title imo)

<comment><USER18> Right, which points strongly to how disproportionate and broken the penalties are in the legal system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've read the piece carefully and the thing that stands out for me most is the bit about the data being 'property'.

It is argued that since JSTOR claims property rights with a tangential link to another case where someone downloaded a chunk of software that was in wide distribution and used that to their defense which was invalidated is reason enough to establish that this data was the property of JSTOR and that any unauthorized download is therefore a breach of the law.

This is interesting because as far as I can see the whole of Aaron's argument revolved around this data being public property all along by virtue of the research being publicly funded and the fact that many authors of these papers can't legally distribute their own work.

If the law can't distinguish between unjust claims of property and a complete lack of public interest on the one side and the good intentions of an individual on the other then you can stick to the 'letter of the law' but that means the law is no longer functional.

I also keep reading about 13 counts, and here there are only 4, is there any reason for the discrepancy or is this commentary based on the pre-September expansion of the charges?

</comment><comment><USER20> The professor says this is a first post is about the law, but it is an assortment of opinions.

 _II. The Legal Charges Brought Against Swartz (a) Wire Fraud. The Wire Fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. 1343, prohibits a scheme to gain "property" by false pretenses. This strikes me as a pretty strong charge here. The false pretenses are provided by the false identification and spoofing of Swartz' IP address and MAC address._

-> This is not false identification, IP or MAC is not tied to Aaron as person. MIT allows guest access and blocking an IP does not mean forbidding to a person access.

 _Swartz was trying to trick JSTOR into giving him access to their database after they had specifically tried their best to ban him from doing so. And the "property" was the contents of the JSTOR database itself._

-> The property is not the contents of the database since it was not produced by them they were handling it.

 _Some might argue that the contents of the JSTOR database should not be considered "property." But I think that's a hard argument to make in light of United States v. Seidlitz, (...) that OSI invested substantial sums to modify the system to suit its peculiar needs, that OSI enjoyed a multi-million dollar competitive advantage because of WYLBUR,(...)_

-> "OSI invested substantial sums to modify the system to suit its peculiar needs, that OSI enjoyed a multi-million dollar competitive advantage because of WYLBUR" ???????? This is the exact opposite of this case where specifically JSTOR cannot alter the content of the producer. It's mission statement says it is also a not for profit organization [1]

 _That reasoning seems to apply reasonably well to the JSTOR database, too. See also Carpenter v. United States, 484 U.S. 19 (1987) (recognizing a property right for purposes of federal fraud statutes for a business in confidentiality and use of information to appear in a forthcoming publication). It's possible to argue that Seidlitz is distinguishable, but I think it's an uphill battle._

-> If it possible to argue, then it is possible for the prosecuter to show discretion

 _(b) Computer Fraud. The next charges were brought under the Computer Fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4), which is a close cousin of the Wire Fraud statute. The two are usually charged together in computer crime cases, and there isn't really all that much that separates them that we need to dwell on here. So let's move on to the next crime._

-> ... so if there isn't a wire fraud there is also no computer fraud?

 _(c) Unauthorized Access. The next charge was unauthorized access to a computer to obtain information valued more than $5,000, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and 18 U.S.C. 1030(c)(2)(B)(iii). I think this charge was a fair one. There are two notable legal issues here. First, was the information valued at more than $5,000? The answer is clearly yes under the leading case of United States v. Batti, (...)methodology when "information obtained by a violation of § 1030(c)(2)(B)(iii) does not have a readily ascertainable market value." In such cases, the court held, "it is reasonable to use the cost of production as a means to determine the value of the information obtained." Creating thousands of journals over many years obviously costs more than $5,000, so that element is easily satisfied._

-> He did not steal any journals. The only thing he got was the content that for JSTOR it had a zero cost of production. At least they have not claimed it did since they dropped the case. The Batti case had as an example a video feed that the company had created, and the cost for its production. That does not seem releveant it is legal name dropping.

 _(...) They blocked his IP address; he changed it. They blocked his MAC address; he spoofed it. They blocked access and he broke into a restricted closet and connected directly to MIT's network. This is not merely a case of breaching a written policy. Rather, this is a case of circumventing code-based restrictions (...)So I think unauthorized access is established here, too._

-> It is pretty clear that he has not exceed anything not explicitly stated. Was there a page saying "We forbid YOU the PERSON to ever access this server?". I guess there wasn't because it would have already become an internet sensation. He did not circumvent code restrictions since there weren't any for MIT guests. The professor does not see why this is different than stealing someone else's password. An interesting view for a law Professor, so help me god.

 _(d) Computer Damage. The final charge brought was exceeding authorized access and thereby impairing the availability or integrity of information in ways that cause more than $5,000 or loss or involve more than 10 computers, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(B) and 1030(c)(4)(A)(i)(I) & (VI). This is a plausible charge, although we'd need to know more details about the case to know if it is fully merited. I've already covered the elements of authorized access, so we can adopt that analysis above here and move on to the other elements._

-> We should thank the unbiased professor here also.

 _To get to $5,000 in a 1030(a)(5) case, the easiest and most widely-accepted methodology in the caselaw is to focus on the time spent responding to the unauthorized access. (...)_

-> JSTOR seems to have had an automated system that cut access so there is not a proof that anyboy worked on it. After the breach was established JSTOR and MIT should provide data of manhours that were used ouside the daily shift (was there overtime? a destruction of the system?). Merely adding restrictions that they previously had CHOSEN not to have as part of the system is definitely not a response cost. They were repairing a broken business model. Anyway good luck obtaining dollar figures from JSTOR or MIT for the prosecutor.

 _The impairment of availability or integrity element would probably be satisfied, as well, (...) And more significantly, does access to a particular service from some users really constitute an impairment of availability of the JSTOR computer itself? I'm not sure, but I'm wary of that argument. So the 1030(a)(5) charges are plausible, but we would need to know more facts to know for sure if they were justified._

->"The impairment of availability or integrity element would probably be satisfied" and "The indictment alleges that Swartz's conduct impaired the working of the JSTOR database but doesn't give us much detail, so it's hard to be sure" are two opposing sentences. Either it is probably justified or it is hard to be sure. Ofcourse since the admins have taken down the system themselves they will have to prove that it would go down by itself. But neither JSTOR or MIT have provided such data.

 _III. Conclusion

My conclusion, at least based on what we know so far, is that the legal charges against Swartz were pretty much legit. Three of them are pretty strong; one is plausible but we would need to know more facts to be sure. Of course, there may have been reasons not to charge Swartz even though he had violated these statutes or to offer him a lenient plea. I'll take on those questions in my next post. But to the extent we're focused on just what the law is, I think that what Swartz was alleged to have done fits pretty well with the charges that were brought._

->My Conclusion: This is a biased opinion but not necessarily wrong or willfully biased. It is legally biased. Truth or Mens Rea is irrelevant and things that are hard to be proven by the government alone are described as self explanatory, or obvious interpretation of facts.

[1] <http://about.jstor.org/about>

</comment><comment><USER21> When the laws, applied fairly and legitimately, have the effect of silencing an activist working for the public benefit, one has to start questioning those laws and the motivations behind them.

<comment><USER22> This activist was working to change laws, so that's a circular argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm looking forward to the second part of this (on prosecutorial discretion) - this is a good analysis.

I feel torn about the trial, and I know I'll get flack for this but what Aaron did was illegal, and I'm sure he knew while he was doing it that it was illegal, or at least in a grey area. At the same time, they were way overly aggressive in prosecuting him.

There's something wrong with the system when someone can have their life destroyed and their resources drained by their choice to exercise civil disobedience in protesting something that is morally wrong.

<comment><USER24> Largely agree although I would insert the word 'probably' before illegal in your second paragraph. It hadn't come to trial yet and we don't have ALL the evidence (especially the defense evidence). I would say that I don't think that the concept of prosecuting him was inherently or clearly wrong.

I'm also very interested to read the second part. I hope it covers the number of counts of each charge brought. This seems to be something that racks up the potential penalty very fast and the individual offences aren't necessarily that distinct from each other

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I read through this and got the opposite impression from most people who are responding here.

This is explicitly not an analysis of right versus wrong. This is an analysis of the cudgel that the prosecutors were about to use on Aaron. This is about whether the charges were likely to stick in court.

The analysis says that the cudgel was very strong. Aaron had real cause to fear. And his defense was going to face an uphill battle.

I look forward to part 2, which is explicitly supposed to be an analysis of whether or not the cudgel should have been swung in the first place.

<comment><USER26> I would be shocked if Part 2 says anything other than "the prosecution's conduct was abusive", given that Swartz's violations were done without commercial intent, caused little if any lasting damage, and were (mostly) not malicious. The defendants in the Gonzalez carding ring got lower sentences than Swartz was threatened with.

<comment><USER25> I suspect the same, else I wouldn't be looking forward to it.

But even though I expect the conclusion, I'll still be very interested to see how a legal expert makes the case persuasively, and manages to support it with objective examples.

However your comparison to the Gonzalez carding ring is highly unfair. We've been repeatedly warned about the difference between statutory maximums and actual penalties. Jail sentences are like college tuition, the actual amount you pay is not the official sticker price you're given.

How much less? According to [http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/14/mit- hacking-case-...](http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/14/mit-hacking-case- lawyer-says-aaron-swartz-was-offered-plea-deal-six-months-behind- bars/hQt8sQI64tnV6FAd7CLcTJ/story.html) the plea bargain that Aaron was offered was that he had to plea guilty to all 13 counts, and spend 6 months in jail. That's a lot less than what the defendants in the Gonzalez carding ring got.

But that's a plea deal. If Aaron took it to trial and won some, lost the others, his likely sentence would be something greater than the plea bargain and significantly less than the maximum. The judge would have discretion, and would likely take everything you say into account in determining the penalty. So I'd still hope it would be less than what the defendants in the Gonzalez carding ringt got.

That said, being declared to be a felon is no picnic, as many can attest. Doubly so if, like Aaron, you have friends all over the world and would like to travel to conferences in other countries. And yes, you can sometimes get the felony officially expunged years later, but even that is imperfect. (As I learned sharing beers with Randal Schwartz...)

<comment><USER26> We know the prosecution felt a 6-7 year outcome was reasonable for the offenses Swartz committed. We know that outcome is worse than that obtained by members of a carding ring. I agree with you: the carders plead out, and the prosecutors were offering a much more lenient sentence to Swartz for pleading out.

The whole thing is a tragic game of chicken. Both players seem to have been dysfunctional in different ways. But the prosecution wielded far more power. If what we know about the case is the whole story, then any reasonable person looking at this case should have been able to see that a 6 year sentence was an unjust outcome. Unlike most HN'ers, I actually have no problem with plea deals and stern prosecutions for people who go to trial; the system has to work that way unless we fund it differently. But the stern prosecutions need to be hemmed in by reason and fairness and logic. Here, it doesn't seem to have been.

<comment><USER25> How do we know that the prosecution felt a 6-7 year outcome was reasonable?

Otherwise we're in violent agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The best refutation to this law professor's analysis is mostly within here: [http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here- is...](http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is-the- evidence)

The application of these federal _penal statutes_ is wholly improper for this case. This case is a _civil matter_.

<comment><USER28> It may have been improper in some grand sense, but that's not what Professor Kerr was addressing. He was addressing whether or not the conduct fit the laws in question, as interpreted by the relevant case law.

Alex Stamos doesn't even really try to refute that. Instead he provides context that suggests that it was an injustice to apply those laws to Aaron Swartz. That's a separate question, and one that Kerr apparently intends to address in a follow up post.

<comment><USER29> The thing that's going to disappoint me is if Kerr strictly analyzes whether the prosecutor choosing to bring the charges was unlawful, which I imagine it probably wasn't -- it's standard operating procedure.

Which is its own problem. But the problem with what prosecutors did is that prosecutors are _allowed not_ to bring the charges and did anyway, notwithstanding the epic disproportionality of the charged penalties to the acts.

In other words, the problem is that the law is defective, and prosecutors could have had a conscience and not abused that fact to break this kid, but they failed at being human, and for that they are culpable. Morally and ethically if not legally.

<comment><USER28> That's supposed to be the second blog post.

While we wait though, I wonder Aaron's lawyers ever explained to him that thirty five years was an all but impossible outcome of this case, that seven years was a longshot and some type of non-incarceration a distinct possibility. If his lawyers for some reason didn't make that clear they did him no favors.

Now whether pervasive overcharging to extract pleas is itself ethical is another question ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You know what Aaron's sin was? Greed.

If he'd set this _same thing_ up so that it would download JSTOR over the course of, say, two years, nobody would ever have been the wiser, we'd actually have that data today since it's actually _been_ two years, and he'd still be alive.

But he had to have all the data NOW. I get it, I really do. He lost track of the goal in the excitement of the pursuit.

<comment><USER31> His sin was being in the middle of the barbell. Act fully legally and under your own name (or, only slightly illegally, and with the intention of being arrested and prosecuted as civil disobedience), or, act entirely covertly, unlinkable to your identity, and just get it accomplished.

Doing things multiple times with risk that someone would set up surveillance is what exposed him. Buying a throwaway laptop for cash, wiping all prints, and hiding it somewhere off-video, waiting a few days, and then starting a slow-leech, uploading the content to some anonymous site, and then acting shocked about how someone copied what he'd done with PACER in this way, would have been a lot safer. $300 laptop is cost of doing business. ATM skimmers crews know this.

<comment><USER32> I agree. After getting detected and stopped the first couple times, I would have preferred him to be a bit more clever.

And certainly when it gets to the point you're worried about being identified via video surveillance, it is time to take a radically different approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ok, fine. Assuming this analysis is correct (and I really lack the legal background to asses this), it does not really change that Aarons accusations was in the mind of people who know what they're talking about utter nonsense.

Hence the logical conclusion is that prosecutors might be fine, but it does not change the fact that the law is completely nonsensical and this is what we should change. How about you guys fire some congresman instead?

<comment><USER29> You can't really fire a Congressman, only vote them out at the next election. But that comes after you push them to fix it and they falter. First we push them to fix it. Hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Unrelated to this, but does anybody else wonder whether the prosecutors would have gone after him when others decided not to if it wasn't for his activism? SOPA being stopped surely annoyed a few powerful people.

What better way to move up in the establishment than by taking out bright activists...

</comment><comment><USER35> On the legal theory used, I do find a few areas where further information would be useful.

In the case of Wire Fraud, is it JSTOR or MIT's rights that was violated if someone under false pretenses gains access to MIT's facilities and MIT's licensed access for research articles? What is the legal precedence in regard to rented or licensed property; is it the licensee's right that was violated if a crime is made to the property whiles in the care of the licensee or is it the licensers? By continuing giving MIT access after the breach of contract/license agreement, does JSTOR still have a legal claim of Wire fraud?

In the case of Unauthorized Access, Orin Kerrthe refer to a methodology of using the cost of production as a means to determine the value of the information obtained. But are we talking about the cost of production that JSTOR did in producing access to the information, or the production of the information itself done by parties not JSTOR or MIT. If we talk about the production efforts made by JSTOR, would the production cost be limited to the licensing fee's that JSTOR is (or are they?) paying to get exclusive access to the research journals?

<comment><USER36> _By continuing giving MIT access after the breach of contract/license agreement, does JSTOR still have a legal claim of Wire fraud?_

You're thinking in terms of a civil suit, where an aggrieved party sues to restore their property/rights/etc. This was a criminal suit where the process is very different: the party suing is always the government in criminal cases, and the only matter at hand is whether the defendant violated the letter of the law. Aggrieved parties don't even have any authority to press or drop charges in criminal cases: that authority rests solely with the government (and the government will often continue cases when the parties involved just want it to go away).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How can spoofing IP/MAC addresses be considered "false pretenses" if these are considered, by nature of how computer networks and management thereof have evolved, to be transient or arbitrary in nature? Spoofing IP/MAC addresses does't even involve "pretenses", because it is a fallacious assumption (usually by the technically illiterate) that IP/MAC addresses correspond, or are even supposed to correspond, to a unique person/computer/entity in the first place. I can't say this is a good analysis by Kerr, given that he ignores extremely basic weaknesses such as this in the charges brought against Swartz.

<comment><USER38> Isn't this like asking "How is wearing a fake mustache in public a false pretense?" It isn't. But if I'm doing it with an obvious intent on deceiving someone about my identity, don't you think that context matters? Even if the fake-mustache seems ridiculous?

<comment><USER37> That's the point, the spoofing of the IP/MAC addresses in themselves prove nothing, and yet Kerr is assessing it as such. The guy with a fake mustache could be a method actor preparing for his next role, and Swartz could have thought "MIT/JSTOR doesn't give a damn if I scrape these articles, but I don't care to ask for official resources to do it just to be told no."

<comment><USER39> > Swartz could have thought "MIT/JSTOR doesn't give a damn if I scrape these > articles, but I don't care to ask for official resources to do it just to be > told no."

except that

1\. his behavior was clearly against JSTOR's terms of service

2\. his computer was blocked MULTIPLE times

3\. when he retrieved his computer, he was using his helmet as a mask to avoid being filmed

<comment><USER37> 1.) We're reading TOS now? Is that against the law?

2.) Irrelevant, could be a simple traffic reduction block.

3.) Too flimsy to rest the entire charge on.

<comment><USER39> > 1.) We're reading TOS now? Is that against the law?

so is your comment a joke reply, or do you have a serious argument? has this ridiculous response indicates that you concede that it is against the terms of service?

> 2.) Irrelevant, could be a simple traffic reduction block.

if he thought it was that, why did he need a mask to retrieve his computer?

> 3.) Too flimsy to rest the entire charge on.

agree. except there's all the stuff above.

<comment><USER27> Violating a private entity's TOS is not a federal crime. He did not mask anything: MIT has an open network, and apparently unlocked wiring closets (trespassing was not charged). Rotating your IP address on an already open network to circumvent said TOS does not constitute a statutory violation either. You can sue him, that's about it.

<comment><USER40> What about JSTOR's TOS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about 35 or more years prison sentence threat ? Whether law was breached, is apparently not contested. What is weird is this sentence.

In France, murder gets you usually at most 20 years jail. The sentence seams totally disproportionate to the harm. Will Mr Orin Kerr also discuss this aspect ?

Another point is the harm done just by the trial. Going for trial is in itself condemning someone to pay a huge amount of money. Even if if that someone is finally proven innocent or the charges excessive and abusive.

<comment><USER26> Clarity:

Swartz wasn't seriously threatened with 35 years. The prosecution told his attorneys they'd seek ~7 years.

7 years is still ludicrous. 1 year would be ludicrous.

The prosecutors can't fairly escape the blame for the "35 years" publicity, because they themselves bragged about it.

Swartz's own lawyer predicted that there'd be minimal chance of him serving any time even if he'd been convicted. First time offender, no commercial purpose, no malice, no lasting damage.

<comment><USER29> I think the 35 years is still important because the law _allows_ the prosecutor to charge that, which is thoroughly insane and needs to be fixed, notwithstanding that the problem there is with the law rather than the prosecutor.

Moreover, it allows prosecutors to threaten defendants with that and coerce even the innocent into plea bargains, and coerce those guilty of minor offenses into plea bargains for multi-year prison terms because the alternative is to risk multi-decade prison terms, which _is_ a problem with the conduct of prosecutors when they choose to do that.

<comment><USER26> The point here is that the prosecution _didn't_ threaten Aaron with 35 years. They were explicit about what they expected to get at trial. When they were trying to scare him, they scared him with a 6-7 year figure.

It is, obviously, an extremely troubling fact that the prosecutors in this particular case decided to try to scare the shit out of the defendant to get him to cop to 13 felonies.

<comment><USER29> >The point here is that the prosecution _didn't_ threaten Aaron with 35 years.

Are we sure of that? Putting 6-7 years instead of 35 in the indictment or a public statement may be calculated by prosecutors to try to avoid outraging the jury or the public with wildly absurd penalties. That doesn't preclude their ability to use the maximum as leverage in plea negotiations prior to that.

I'm willing to admit that I don't know either, but we can't assume what we don't know one way or the other. My point is that prosecutors should be precluded from being able to do that, and in general should be chastised for doing it even if they are legally allowed to, regardless of what happened in this specific case.

<comment><USER26> His attorney said so directly, disclosing this weekend that:

* If Swartz plead out, he was being required to plea to all 13 counts.

* If he plead out the prosecution would seek some prison time.

* If he went to court, the prosecution would seek 6-7 years of prison time.

* His own attorney expected that even if he was found guilty, he would receive a suspended sentence.

No credible source suggests that the prosecution seriously entertained or threatened 35 years. Though, again, the prosecution brought this misunderstanding on themselves by bragging to the media about a 35 year sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> We really need to change the laws as they relate to computer crime and copyright.

<comment><USER26> I do not agree. Beyond that, I worry that what geeks hope for is a situation where the plain language of the law protects them from "overcharging". That's never going to happen. A zealous prosecutor is going to be able to make your life miserable no matter what. That's the problem we need to address.

Count me among those who think what Swartz did _could_ reasonably have been charged as a felony, but _should never_ have been charged as multiple felonies.

Swartz' attorneys tried to arrange a plea deal and were told that Swartz would need to cop to all thirteen felonies, and would still serve prison time. If all we know now is all there is to the story, that's a gross abuse on the part of Stephen Heymann's office.

<comment><USER29> >Beyond that, I worry that what geeks hope for is a situation where the plain language of the law protects them from "overcharging". That's never going to happen. A zealous prosecutor is going to be able to make your life miserable no matter what. That's the problem we need to address.

I don't know if overcharging is an unsolvable problem. "Plain language" may not be the right approach, but taking the excessive breadth and poor wording out of existing legislation would go a long way toward removing the number of felony counts a prosecutor can "legitimately" charge a typical bystander with.

Here are a couple of examples: A lot of these laws have threshold amounts of property that have to be in question before someone can be guilty of the crime. (And the amounts haven't been adjusted for inflation in several decades, which we could easily fix too.) But the real trouble there is that we take the amounts and then shovel a whole bunch of questionable nonsense into what can qualify. If I'm reading Prof. Kerr's analysis correctly, if someone breaks into your computer and you hire someone to clean it up, that goes in. You're paying them, so just pay them enough to hit the threshold and you've made a felon of the accused. It seems the value of intangible works goes in, so you bring in the copyright mathematicians who say one copy of one work is worth $150,000, which makes that element of the charge totally redundant in virtually every single case involving a computer, because all computers do is send data to one another, and virtually all data is copyrighted, so you copy one work and it exceeds the threshold and you're guilty of a felony. So let's take the ability to count all of that sort of thing out of that requirement and only include actual cash money or tangible physical products with specific market values, and if you want to have criminal copyright statutes or trade secret misappropriation statutes with appropriate penalties then let them be separate from statutes originally intended to deal with fraud and sabotage.

Then we can get rid of the vagueness. "Unauthorized access" is nonsense words. If someone is guilty of fraud, charge them with fraud. If someone is guilty of copyright infringement, sue them. If someone accesses a computer without authorization and hasn't committed any other offense whatsoever, use technological measures to prevent future access and don't charge them with anything.

Furthermore, we can do something about the maximum penalties. 35 years is _insane_. It's insane for actual hardened criminals -- bank robbers often go to jail for five years. _Murder_ is on the order of 25 to life. We can make the maximum penalty for any computer crime that isn't also a serious non- computer crime something like 364 days.

Is that the sort of thing you mean to do to check over-zealous prosecutors, or did you have something else in mind? Because I'm open to suggestions. And we can do both.

<comment><USER26> A problem with this analysis is that Swartz _was_ charged with fraud.

There is no question, at least none I can find anywhere, that Swartz was overcharged, and that requiring prison time from a plea deal or a threat of 6-7 years in prison was unreasonable. The problem we face is that prosectors aren't held accountable for failures to exercise discretion. In Chicago, a local prosecutor pursued a felony charge against someone who recorded two internal affairs officers. She was roundly castigated in the media for doing so, but won reelection handily, because nobody pays any attention to what prosecutors are doing.

It may very well be that the problem here is lack of funding for prosecutors and the courts; that we should give them _more money_ , instead of playing a futile game of whack-a-mole when problems like this happen, so that we can make saner decisions about prosecuting people and not immediately push every case into a tragic game of chicken.

<comment><USER29> >A problem with this analysis is that Swartz _was_ charged with fraud.

That's what I'm saying. We should change the definition of "computer fraud" and other felonies so that they no longer cover what Swartz is alleged to have done.

Computer fraud should cover breaking into Amazon's order processing system and modifying the database so that they ship you $50,000 worth of jewelry without you paying for it. What Swartz allegedly did is more accurately characterized as something like excessive use or (for entering the network closet) physical trespass, for which the maximum penalty should be a modest fine along the lines of a speeding ticket. There should exist no felony charge available for prosecutors to use whose text can be legitimately said to cover his actions. All felonies should require extremely serious harm, such as personal injury or death, physical damage, or depriving others of extremely high value property explicitly for the purpose of personal financial gain. In all other cases there may be an offense but it should not be a felony, and we can work to have the law changed to reflect that.

I understand that even if we do that, it may be possible for prosecutors to file totally fictitious charges against their targets, but in those cases at least in theory it should be trivial for the defendant's lawyer to win quickly with a motion to dismiss, unless law enforcement is going so far as to fabricate evidence and the like, which is a different class of problem.

>It may very well be that the problem here is lack of funding for prosecutors and the courts; that we should give them _more money_ , instead of playing a futile game of whack-a-mole when problems like this happen, so that we can make saner decisions about prosecuting people and not immediately push every case into a tragic game of chicken.

I agree with this as long as you concede that the only way it will be possible is to drastically reduce the number of accused somehow. If we prosecuted significantly fewer criminals (for example because we repealed many of the unnecessary laws that they are now prosecuted under) then we can easily afford to spend more resources on each case. I don't think the alternative will be possible: Spending significantly more per case without significantly reducing the number of cases would be prohibitively expensive, because there are currently _so many_ people accused of serious crimes.

<comment><USER26> He's not accused of overusing JSTOR's systems so much as he is accused of intentionally copying their whole database so he could deliver them to file sharing networks. That action would have seriously harmed JSTOR.

<comment><USER29> >That action would have seriously harmed JSTOR.

I think we could reasonably argue about that; the entire database is freely available to anyone who goes into a major university library, etc., and unless posting the articles resulted in universities ceasing to subscribe to JSTOR (which seems unlikely) then they lose no significant revenue. But this is going off on a tangent.

Even if I concede that JSTOR would be financially harmed, it still shouldn't be a _felony_. Let them sue him for copyright infringement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> People like Orin Kerr are part of the problem. Anyone associated with the DoJ can't see that the DoJ is the problem, not the Aaron Swartzes of the world.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

<comment><USER43> _Anyone associated with the DoJ can't see that the DoJ is the problem_

Why? He is precise in what his post is doing: simply making an evaluation of whether the charges stack up with the law on the books. He neither promises nor tries to evaluate the legitimacy of the laws. I think that is perfectly fine and in fact I'd love if more qualified folks shared their specific interpretation of the law with minimal bias in either direction.

<comment><USER44> > "He neither promises nor tries to evaluate the legitimacy of the laws."

Which also implies that there is hardly any possibility for his analysis to be 'incorrect' because it is rooted to come out as correct within the provisions of existing laws.

Isn't that so?

<comment><USER43> His analysis can still be incorrect. For example, other legal experts may disagree with his interpretation of blah law. This is why I think more, not less, somewhat emotion-free evaluation would be helpful.

If we learn the laws are far overreaching, it requires a different set of actions to attempt to change than if we find that the charges don't align with the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact that it was 'perfectly legal' definitely does not make it right.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thanks for the adult, reasoned perspective Professor Kerr--it was much-needed. I have been dismayed (but not surprised) by the ghoulish treatment of this poor kid. He's a perfect martyr for movement-minded people. The only movement he should inspire right now is a gut check by anyone who is "mentoring" a minor or a troubled young person. Are you mentoring him/her for his/her benefit, or for your own? I'm sure it's immensely flattering for the leading lights of the various hacker and open source, open information movements to have brilliant youngsters sitting at their feet, capering and reacting to their social manifestos. Well, I hope Aaron's whole-hearted devotion was gratifying to SOMEONE. I personally wish he had never been allowed to wander at an impressionable age among the manifesto crowd, who in fact do incite criminal actions by their followers. They have now shown that they will allow themselves to address a child as though he is an adult, and let the chips fall where they may. But of course we all know who the REAL villains are: those who have and attempt to assert property rights. Just astounding. I think I will have to avert my gaze from this crowd of ghouls--I don't want to see a dead kid's face on tee shirts and posters, but that is where this is going.

</comment><comment><USER46> Stay classy, Orin Kerr.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think it's important to note here that Orin Kerr was a DoJ lawyer before he became a law professor[0]. It is likely that he maintains ties and some degree of loyalty to his former employer (many people do). Many bloggers would include a disclaimer on a blog post defending a former employer in a contentious matter, but Kerr did not.

0\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orin_Kerr>

<comment><USER48> It's also worth noting that he literally wrote the book on the law of computer crime [1], and served as a pro bono (free) defense attorney _against_ the DOJ in the Lori Drew MySpace case [2], and he was extensively critical of the government in that case [3], and he has testified before Congress to say that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is too broad.[4]

He worked for the DOJ from 1998-2001. If he harbors sympathies for the government, they're pretty well hidden at this point.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Crime-Law-American- Casebook/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Crime-Law-American- Casebook/dp/0314204547) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew> [3] [http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_05_11-2008_05_17...](http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_05_11-2008_05_17.shtml#1210889188) [4] [http://www.volokh.com/2011/11/14/my-congressional- testimony-...](http://www.volokh.com/2011/11/14/my-congressional-testimony-on- the-need-to-narrow-the-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act/)

<comment><USER49> Orin doesn't harbor sympathies for anyone. He has his own viewpoints, some of which match up with the government, and some of which don't. I took classes on computer crime from him when I was in law school :)

At this point, he seems more interested in the development of 4th amendment jurisprudence as it relates to technology that he does the CFAA in particular.

At least on that front, he's been wildly wrong about future development of the 4th amendment so far. He was a strong opposer of the "mosaic theory" of the 4th amendment, and thought there was a 0% chance the supreme court would go for it, and he was completely and utterly wrong.

So take what he says with a grain of salt. He's a brilliant commentator on the CFAA, but a lot of what he says seems to be based on an idea that courts don't really change law to suit justice or policy given sets of facts, which at least, IMHO, is completely false.</comment></comment></comment>


7-year-old girl raises $7k to buy multiskintone Crayons for classrooms - <AUTHOR> https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/living/story/year-raises-thousands-multicultural-crayons-books-classrooms-71554154 <comment><USER2> It's typically white people funding these types of causes. Does any black person actually think it's a good idea to draw attention towards skin color at such young age without giving children any context?

Children don't naturally think about these differences at all. Parents are the ones who teach them to focus on it. They real lesson should be that skin color is not important - Not that it's so important that you need a fancy box of crayons to represent all the tones accurately... That is insane! What next? Are we going to start punishing children for misrepresenting people's exact skin tones? They can barely draw accurate stick figures.</comment>


Show HN: Opensource Desktop Implementation of the Threema Crypto Messenger - ThE_-_BliZZarD https://github.com/blizzard4591/openMittsu <comment><AUTHOR> Excellent! Due to its privacy protection (it can be used anonymously) Threema is my favorite messenger!

</comment><comment><USER2> +1 for GPLv2 or later. :D

</comment><comment><USER3> Screenshots?

<comment> ThE_-_BliZZarD One has been added in the Repo :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: WP Offload S3 – Offload Your Assets to S3 and Cloudfront - <AUTHOR> https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-offload-s3/ <comment><USER2> How is this really different than the many other wp-to-s3 plugins out there?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I respond to someone claiming he has an exploit on my site? - <AUTHOR> He's gone straight to asking if we'll pay for an exploit. I'm pretty sure it's a scam but obviously don't want to get in a situation where we've ignored a real issue. We don't have an official bug bounty program, but we'd be happy to pay out if it turns out to be a real exploit. What's the right course of action here? <comment><USER2> In my opinion and experience, if you decide to communicate with the individual, ask them to create an account on HackerOne [1]. You should do so as well. Even if the pay-out for your bugs was really small, at least you have given the person an opportunity to register a payment method that can potentially link back to them. You would have also given them and others a well defined process to report the bug.

[1] - [https://www.hackerone.com/](https://www.hackerone.com/)

On a side note, look through all of your access logs leading up to the communication. That can give you an idea of what bots and security tools were enumerating. Then dig deeper into each script they hit with your security team, or hire someone to analyze your code. Also, try to export dumps of your databases and look for things that should not be there. i.e. entries by unauthenticated services or users.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to give a bounty to a user on HackerOne even if you don't run a bounty program? I thought that the only way to pay them was if they submit a report to your own program. Obviously this is a problem is you don't have a program.

<comment><USER2> You would create your bounty program through them. The hackers would register with HackerOne and follow their process. In my opinion, that is much safer than creating your own program if you don't already have a modest sized legal, compliance and security teams.

<comment><USER3> Right yeah that's what I was thinking.

The problem is that the process of creating a HackerOne bounty program can take a short while to get to the stage where you can invite hackers - if you have an active hacker on the line like OP does, that could be too long of a wait.

<comment><USER2> Advise them you are looking into creating your bug bounty program and kindly ask them to wait while you get things set up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Identify the _absolute worst thing_ that can happen if this individual does truly have a significant exploit on your site. What is the _absolute_ worst thing?

2) Accept that #1 might happen. As in _truly_ accept this as a possibility

3) Work in ways to mitigate #1. What active steps can you start taking right this very minute to mitigate any potential damage done from the worst case scenario in #1?

</comment><comment><USER5> I would start by trying to scan the site using something like nmap or Metasploit ([https://www.metasploit.com/](https://www.metasploit.com/)) to see if they find anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my experience, most of these are just low-level extortion attempts where they run a point-and-click vulnerability scan and ask for money to see the results.

Before I had a bounty program I'd politely reply asking for information on the vulnerability, but now I do have a bounty program so I just point them there.

If the issue turns out to be real and you want to reward them, be very careful paying them directly, as often they seem to want Google-level bounty values even though you might only be a small business.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would not open any dialogue with the attackers. Here's the advice from the FBI for ransom-ware:

[https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber](https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber)

[https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/ransomware-prevention- an...](https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/ransomware-prevention-and-response- for-cisos.pdf/view)

</comment><comment><USER7> It depends a bit on the phrasing, but in all cases where someone asked if we would pay for vulnerability reports and we replied we would not pay, only offer acknowledgement on our security page, they would still share the report.

If you are going to pay, make sure you clearly state scope and the type of exploits you pay for. Otherwise there is a high probability of it being something in the realm of being able to iframe your site.

</comment><comment><USER8> Look through your access logs and see if you can figure out what they found.

If you can't, talk to them about what kind of exploit it is (so you can agree on a reasonable payout) and then pay on the condition they do a non- destructive demo of the exploit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tell him that extortion isn't the best way to build a friendship and that if he wants to do something illegal then you'll happily forward him the contact info of some criminal attorneys

<comment><USER2> While this is true, the personality type of the white/grey/blackhat may take that as provocative and a challenge. In my opinion, this is a risky approach. If their intent is malicious, they will not be turned away by threats.</comment></comment>


Researchers invent process to produce renewable car tires from trees, grass - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10304.html <comment><USER2> Word-for-word blogspam of

[http://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/researchers-invent-pr...](http://twin- cities.umn.edu/news-events/researchers-invent-process-produce-renewable-car- tires-trees-grass)

Research paper:

[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscatal.6b03335](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscatal.6b03335)

</comment><comment><USER3> Renewable technology is so hard. If only there were huge mountains of used tires everywhere around the world, then we could just recycle those.</comment>


Free O'Reilly Books - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/openbook/ <comment><USER2> Managing Projects with Make 3rd edition <http://oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/index.csp>

This is the definitive reference to the software that lifts you from writing software to building software systems.

See also <http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/> for why it's still a useful book, 27 years after the first edition. Compare that to most of the technical books you own; most of which were hopelessly obsolete by the ripe age of 27 months.

<comment><USER3> Actually I find it quite sad.

It means many developers are doing software in 2013 as if their main system was a System V one, stuck in 1977.

<comment><USER2> Not quite, a linux system of ~2010 has several advances over a Unix system/V from the late 1970's it's a late 1960s muscle car compared to the Model A of PDP-11. Same basic technology under the hood, but refined and much better understood.

Most of the "advanced" programming environments look very nice but fail to meet the needs of real world usage; where you have to talk to other systems and get dirty doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software_ <http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/index.html>

I'm familiar with the general gist of the FSF's philosophies but I had never really sat down and read an in-depth write up of the importance of Free Software, so I'm looking forward to reading this :)

<comment><USER5> I found it good and think you can look forward to reading it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Just finished reading the first chapter and I found it to be surprisingly well written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Through its Open Library project, the Internet Archive is scanning and > hosting PDF versions of our open books.

 _scanning_?? I would have thought that O'Reilly could give text/source to the Internet Archive that could be massaged into a better quality output product. (And allow formats other than just PDF -- text/epub/mobi/etc.)

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't be surprised if the originals are lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is also _Learning JavaScript Design Patterns_.

It's an O'Reilly book, and it's under creative commons, but it's not on that list.

You can find it here:

[http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/bo...](http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Does HN have any good picks from this list?

I see a lot of out of print books and books not about programming/software development, so if there are any that someone could recommend from this massive list I'd appreciate that.

<comment><USER10> A lot of the stuff in it is out of date, but `Unix Text Processing' is a great read, if only to get a feel for the concepts and ideas.

<comment><USER11> That title caught my eye also. Not much difference between Unix text processing then, and now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Grief, I had dead tree versions of the XView books back in 1993. Back when dealing with X was Proper Work. None of this GNOME bullshit.

<comment><USER13> Yeah - doing X work was "my job" for a few years in the early nineties. The various O'Reilly XLib/Xt books were a godsend. Still have 'em somewhere in the garage.

<comment><USER14> I also have a few of those sitting in boxes in my garage. Every time I do some cleaning-up, I debate (just for a second!) whether I should dispose of them, but end up keeping them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bought _The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog_ in early 1994. I had an account at NERDC, a 9600 baud Intel modem, and connection time was $0.01/minute. One month my bill was over $20.00.

That's a lot of Gopher and Usenet.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised that there isn't any Fortran guides or manuals on how to maintain VT100 terminals on the list.

<comment><USER17> Just checked, they don't have no TECO manuals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Open Feedback Publishing System from O'Reilly is another source <http://ofps.oreilly.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Many of these books are out-of-print for a reason - they're not really relevant in todays tech landscape. There's a few gems in here though.

<comment><USER20> And those are...?

<comment><USER21> My choices for the "good" ones are:

The PNG book: <http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/toc.html>

The GNU Make book: <http://oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/index.csp>

The Subversion book: <http://svnbook.red-bean.com/>

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/>

And I haven't read it, but I would guess "Making TeX Work" is still relevant: <http://makingtexwork.sourceforge.net/mtw/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've found Unix Text Processing (<http://oreilly.com/openbook/utp/>) to be very very helpful when trying to some data processing I would normally do in excel.

</comment><comment><USER23> It says that Archive.org is producing pdfs of these books, but I'm not having any luck finding the Managing Projects with Make as a pdf. Anyone else see it?

EDIT: I misunderstood, it's at archive.org's openlibrary project: [http://openlibrary.org/works/OL3823216W/Managing_projects_wi...](http://openlibrary.org/works/OL3823216W/Managing_projects_with_Make)

</comment><comment><USER24> I was excited to find one book as html broken into chapters, but the others are in various formats - there isn't much consistancy - which makes it difficult to read them, or write my own glue code - to get them onto my e-reader.

</comment><comment><USER25> The list of out of print books is twice as long as those still in print.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh man, a book on Mason! That takes me back to some good old Perl days.

</comment><comment><USER27> Good</comment>


Diver attacked by Elon Musk as 'pedo guy' is prepping a libel suit - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/29/diver-attacked-by-elon-musk-as-pedo-guy-is-prepping-a-libel-suit/ <comment><USER2> Musk needs a long vacation, involuntary if necessary. His performance in actually running a car company hasn't really been all that great, certainly not stellar enough to offset his increasingly bizarre behavior.</comment>


Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/ <comment><USER2> People get fatter as they get older, usually, so you would expect people to be thinner when they were over 30 years younger. Assuming the difficulty has remained the same.</comment>


Microsoft's Energy-Wasting Strong-Arm Tactics Show That Redmond Hasn't Changed   - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/09/microsofts-energy-wasting-strong-arm-tactics-show-that-redmond-hasnt-changed.php

<comment><USER2> If it costs you more to not use something than to use something, well, what do you think is going to happen? Sounds like a poor incentive structure to me, one which was almost certainly not put into place by the customer.</comment>