Hacker Killed by Drone Was 'Secret Weapon' | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Killed by Drone Was 'Secret Weapon'

wsj.com

24 pointsBud23 comments

Can we flag this for being pay-walled? For all we know this is spam encouraging me to buy the WSJ.

Here's a non-paywalled link:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

> Flagging an article that's otherwise good for HN, purely because it's behind one of these semi-paywalls, is not an ok use of flagging. We revoke flagging rights from accounts that do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032121

> The HN guidelines explicitly call for original sources. We want the best, most substantive version of a story. Other things being equal, we all prefer non-paywalled articles, but when things are not equal, substance should win. When there are standard workarounds to read the content, paywalls are just an inconvenience. The more this comes up, the clearer it gets that we shouldn't ban paywalls.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9717733

All the substance that I am able to access in this case is:

>Hacker Killed by Drone Was ‘Secret Weapon’

>Targeting of Islamic State’s electronics expert shows how digital warfare has upset balance of power on modern battlefield

>By MARGARET COKER in London, DANNY YADRON in San Francisco and DAMIAN PALETTA in Washington Aug. 27, 2015 7:36 p.m. ET

>U.S. and British officials decided earlier this year that a hacker needed to die.

So I don't really understand what the 'Secret Weapon' the title of the post means, or anything more than the fact that according to US and UK officials a hacker needed to die and was indeed killed by a drone. Not much to hold a meaningful discussion really.

>So I don't really understand what the 'Secret Weapon' the title of the post means

It was his "hacker" callsign.

What if people kept posting links to a paid service? (even if it was supposedly the best thing ever)

Some people might be subscribed to it, some people might be convinced by the synopsis to pay.

Many of the "science" threads on HN lead to paywalled sites where only an abstract or summary is available without login but that's sadly very common these days as it's hard to get access to published papers without having a university login.

That said as far as WSJ goes you can't publish the paywall bypass link, Google removed the "Google Sent Me" chrome extensions for a reason as it was a violation in their opinion.

The Google referral is selective choice by the site owner, it varies from country to country, site to site, and article to article.

I agree, and was whole-heartedly flagging paywalled articles, until a fellow commentor pointed out that one of the Admins has said that people who do this will face consequences.

Which I think is rather stupid, so I've started using other news sites instead for most of my news. But that's me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9717601

Which ones?

While we can debate the effectiveness or 'legality' of drone strikes why is this case any special? He's a member of a non-nation state militant organization, he's clearly (as much as this can be in such cases, but ISIS likes to take credit and not to hide it's footprint) responsible for multiple acts of violence which resulted in deaths. What does it matter if it's an extremist cleric who recruits, incites violence and supports ISIS, AQ, or any other similar organizations through video tapes from a cave or a "hacker" which uses twitter to do the same?

Is this being reported on by anyone other than WSJ? I don't like paywalls.

Yes.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/27/junaid-hussain-...

Apparently it didn't take Obama long to do another 180 on this issue as well:

"I'm not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker," he told reporters during a news conference in Senegal.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/26/politics/nsa-leak/index.ht...

It's pretty disingenuous to interpret this statement as the president giving a free pass to all twentysomething hackers.

I agree. Obama's record is quite clear when it comes to drone assassinations as a cheaper alternative to dragging people in for their day in court-- his own constituents included.

Seems like he didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrambling_(military)

I bypassed the paywall by googling the url of the article, because they whitelist google as a referer.

Only for US IPs. If you are from Germany, even with a Google referer you don’t get the article.

I could read the article from Mexico:

https://www.google.com.mx/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=we...

Well, from Germany it seems to not work at all.

I archived it through archive.is using your link (which uses X-Forwarded-For to allow wsj to see my IP), and the page looks like this: https://archive.is/HsIiC

Works from the UK, if you are unlucky go to https://www.4proxy.us/ type in https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&newwindow=1&site=&so...

And it will work ;)

You seem to be right (https://i.imgur.com/VBfbvOv.png), but I thought sites accessed through HTTPS, like Google, are never sent as referers.

They are sent as referers to other HTTPS sites. But not to plain text ones.

He was an avowed member of ISIS, an army. He was a legitimate target. I'm glad he is dead. He's complicit in the rape and murder of countless people.

Setting my referrer to Googlebot doesn't break the paywall. Uuuuuugh

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