chaps

Hah no kidding. I tried just, "bill_gates" --

  {
    "username": "bill_gates",
    "isReserved": false,
    "isDeleted": false,
    "categories": []
  }

what's the point of this thing...?

Frankly, I'm not sure why explaining it (or the explanation) makes the situation any better.

FWIW, I'm the kind of weirdo who gets annoyed by having to add a new noscript rule for every federated instance. So I'm not exactly Matrix's target audience.

"If you're particularly concerned about metadata footprint, you can run your own servers in whatever network environment you feel like"

You're not going to win any long-term support with this attitude, even if you're technically right. Like, if we're still in this "why doesn't the pleb just become a part time sysadmin" way of thinking, it's hard to think it's not just DoA.

Not directly an answer to your question, but installed Shotspotter locations are generally "not shared with police" and installations are done in a way where the location is obfuscated away from the police/city through Shotspotter contractors. It's not actually true that the device locations aren't shared with the police, but shotspotter/police testimonies in shotspotter cases say so anyway.

Here's the video for interested folk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

  > but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

This is not what Flock seeks to curb.

I've looked at many, many criminal court cases with these questions in mind and it really isn't that simple in court. Judges and prosecutors very often and truly don't give a fuck. Or the prosecution will just nolle the case if issues of facts come up. That happens with a lot of technology oriented cases, eg shotspotter and stingrays, where 4a issues are dropped. See [1].

Please realize that defense counsel is fighting an uphill battle while their client is stuck in pretrial limbo. The issue of parallel construction, with some exception, will not really come up. As many lawyers have told me -- what matters to them is getting their client out of jail/pretrial. And because that's the concern over all else, the publicly available information about these abuses simply don't come up in the public eye. So these problems go and go and go.

Really, a lot of what you hope happens in court just... really fucking doesn't. All that'll happen is people will be in jail longer because so many people were arrested under 4a-violating arrests and the defense attorneys get more work load.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2290703-chicago-pd-f...

Friend, you should try actually submitting some FOIA requests or bumping up against the "open data" stuff out there. What you're suggesting works in a perfect world where government agencies actually want to disclose information. They do not. Saying this as someone who's been in constant FOIA litigation for ten years.

I'm with you on shooting for the moon, but there are many, many, many little wins that need to happen before then. But it's not work that'll happen on its own. If you want to have your hand in poking at the problem, the best place to start is to start submitting FOIA requests to the places you'd want disclosure from and hold them accountable (ie, sue them) when they inevitably don't give you what they're legally required to give.

That's even harder than FOIA.

Okay now, how do you show that it's not being abused? FOIA? Good luck.

You're misreading my post with Coinbase-tinted glasses. My post is about the building that Coinbase operated out of. Not Coinbase itself.

Here's the top of a conversation I had with him, starting with me:

  Thanks for the thought out response. I agreed with just about everything you said, which makes this whole situation that much more frustrating. On one side, you're right and you're trying to create substantive discussion, which their sensationalist reporting often rubs against. On the other hand, [dead] in its current state is neither informative nor allows for substantive conversation about why it's [dead]. Ironically, the action of [dead]'ing looks like a malicious response from you and your colleagues -- something that's still hard for me to shake, especially considering who owns HN and who's within its network. Or at the very least, it looks malicious in the face of potentially simple UX changes.

His response:

  Yes, I hear those frustrations and they all make sense. I'm afraid I'm pessimistic, though (having been at this job for many years) about the possibility of a fuller explanation ever clearing up these perceptions—for example the perception about "who owns HN and who's within its network" being the main factor in what gets marked as [dead] on the site. In my experience, (some) people are going to believe that, regardless of anything we say or do. A lot of people on the internet are primed to perceive maliciousness and, sadly, I don't think we have the power to change that.
 
  I also don't think it's possible to "promote substantive discussion about why [a post' is dead" because that sort of meta-talk invariably becomes bogged down and self-referential. In my experience, such discussions don't lead anywhere productive, they just generate more and more of the same. 

  The moderation burden such meta-discussions impose is high, because if we don't answer and explain, our absence gets taken to mean that we're hiding something and/or that whatever people are accusing us of must be true. That's potentially disastrous for HN because it means that those moderation resources get sucked away from things that matter more for the quality of the site.

  But I don't want to come across as too dismissive! I appreciate your openness and your suggestions and will think further about them.

The big problem is that the exchanges are largely self-regulated. Or at least when I was in the field. A company I worked at sued a counterparty to our trade because we had proof of market manipulation. I won't say any of the details of who, etc, but the trades of the counterparty were so... plainly obvious of market manipulation in violation of the exchange's rules. At one point in that lawsuit the exchange's lawyers accidentally CC'd my bosses, showing that the exchange was colluding with the counterparty.

From what I was told, the issue for the exchange was that if they were found out to not enforce their self regulation then it'd be the precipitous event to the hammer coming down on them from regulatory bodies.

So yeah. Regulation's kinda shite here.

Yeah. Lots of stuff exposed stuff out there can stay exposed for quite a long time without being targeted or noticed. I've found quite a bunch and usually all it takes is... looking. Just one of those weird things about the modern world.

Sorry, that's not me. They were more than welcome to fire me as a client.

I've been oncall for long enough in my career to know that a "quick email" is not, really, a "quick" email. It can completely derail everything you do for the day. If on-request work takes five minutes to write an email, then that time includes reading the email, thinking about the email, responding to the email, the cost of derailment of other contract work, the cost of getting back into that other contract work, the research needed to tell them "no". Again, it's about setting boundaries with the client.

They initially hired me to do "network security" work. Another similar email-then-bill situation is me responding to them telling them why I won't, under any circumstances, figure out who wrote a Glassdoor review.

A lot of it is about setting boundaries with the client. If I have a conversation with you a handful of times to remove password from a whiteboard and you don't do it, that's a big deal and would professionally impact me if something bad happened. Cause like, your client's clients includes Coinbase. Like another person commented -- I really should have just dropped them as a client because the professional risk was too high.

Your post reads like something a lawyer would write to convey something that while (maybe) technically true, misses the point by a hundred miles.

Once did some programming/networking work for a company that did the networking of a office sharing building that Coinbase was running out of. Early in my work there I noticed that the company had its admin passwords written on a whiteboard -- visible from the hallway because they had glass for walls. So I sent them an email to ask that they remove it (I billed them for it).

Their fix was to put a piece of paper over the passwords.

What a time.

Used to hate pigeons in my 20s. Not like, vile hatred or anything like that, just.... man, what's up with these pigeons.

Now, I live at a place that has a tiny pigeon colony right outside my window. Every morning, a cute pigeon couple flies up to my window sill to watch me for a bit. Sometimes they're not there, presumably hanging out with other pigeons.

Their instinct's to fly away from me if I get close or adjust in my seat, but when we're all just chilling, their feathers floof up into a ball of what looks like comfortable warmth. They slowly blink their eyes like cats and their preening care for each other is always cute.

They are not graceful.

You are so, so close.

If it's a major city, why isn't their FOIA team larger? Signed: A frequent requester.

I read their comments as knowing that.

Imagine a world where you don't need to click on anything because cookies are no longer being used for large scale tracking.

Yes.

Sadly, nah. It works.

An old colleague and friend used to print out a 30 page perl script he wrote to do almost exactly this in this scenario. A stapled copy could always be found on his dining room table.

I love postgres and have created my own "data lake" sorta systems -- what would this add to my workflows?

This might just be the most HN comment I've ever read.

Also fair! I think "leaker" is just bristly to me in this context, when there's a nearly identical version of it just hanging out for folk to find. But also just a hope that some folk might poke around documentcloud for similar documents lying around. Lots of newsworthy gems in there just waiting to be picked up and this's a good example.

I'm not disputing that. :)