Hacker News Reader

Comment by mars4rp | Hacker News Reader

People have weird hobbies!

Edit: I mean he went and bought some random CDs, He discovered this really great photos but how long he is doing this for? How many CDs he bought and looked at?

View on HN

Jason Scott is a treasure. People will be thanking him for his preservation efforts for millennia.

If you're not familiar with him and his work, check out his website (http://textfiles.com) and the excellent _Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It_ podcast (http://ascii.textfiles.com/podcast).

Per the quote in the article, "people who are moved by them should consider donating to a worthy cause of their choice", if anyone is moved by these photos and doesn't know where to make a donation, you might consider supporting Jason's work on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/textfiles/posts) or making a donation to The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/), where he works.

(I'm not affiliated with Jason or The Internet Archive in any way, but I am (as you can probably tell) a big fan of both.)

You'd love his DEFCON talk! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY

This is great, thanks!

Potentially dangerous hobby. What if one of those CDs had child porn on it and it was in a stack he didn't look at/index. Then some Police have a warrant for something unrelated, find the CDs and charge him.

Possession of such material is a strict liability crime. Intent doesn't matter, nor even knowledge that you have the material. That's what happened in the case of Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman).

What a dangerous law. All a bad actor has to do is plant incriminating material on a target’s computer and they can be put away for years.

It's even worse in the UK. Someone can put an encrypted file on a thumb drive and put it in your belongings. You're required by law to give passwords in the UK and if you're unable to, you just go to prison.

Is it possible to embed images in email, and disable display? If so, a spam campaign could leave child porn in cache on millions of machines. Or it could be targeted, combined with a SWAT.

What if I made a web server that returns a file that has the same content as the base64 encoded requested name? For example Echo.com/SGVsbG8.txt would return a utf8 text file with the content “hello”. If a smart ass sent a certain link to law enforcement it would serve illegal content.

I think legally its still simple, the base64 encoding is still illegal content. Just because it's not easily recognizable as so doesn't change what it is. As long as it's easy enough for law enforcement to prove the string when decoded is illegal content, then the act of sending the string is the crime. Law enforcement being in possession of it would just be evidence like usual.

Until he finds one with a bitcoin wallet on it, I guess!

Hopefully the key is there with it.

People didn't encrypt wallets, back in the day.

Sure, but wouldn't you need the key to sign a transaction to move/use the coins?

A bitcoin wallet is just a collection of private keys.

And that's why it's so important to encrypt them. And for wallets controlling huge amounts, to keep them offline. Air-gapped, I mean.

That's part of the wallet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com