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Those transaction cost estimates are extremely volatile. I recently tried to pay 50 sat/vB (~$4) for a transaction on a Monday and it didn’t clear until Saturday. Unfortunately mempool.space doesn’t seem to publish historical data, but it seems that weekends do affect Bitcoin, in that transactions are significantly cheaper.

This doesn’t apply to mobile devices, since it’s not feasible to remove the internal storage device and take a bit-perfect image of it using another computer. You need to plug the device into a Cellebrite kiosk, trust Cellebrite to send read-only commands over the USB interface, and trust the device firmware not to write data when it receives those commands.

Yes, and it’s not an uncommon defence in child pornography cases. Similarly, you can always claim that the police framed you by lying about the device being found in your possession, or not being tampered with between seizure and forensic analysis. It is up to the jury to decide whether the defence gives rise to a reasonable doubt.

The standard is not as high as most technically-minded people think. Juries can convict defendants on the uncorroborated testimony of a single witness: https://newrepublic.com/article/152305/who-to-believe-sexual...

Copyright does not include an exclusive right to private performance. There is nothing to license here. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

How does this work? Is it normal for university libraries to keep a huge secret backup collection of PDFs? What happens if the university chooses to discontinue its subscription, as opposed to the publisher going out of business?

It’s not really ‘standard’ because instructing expert witnesses and going to trial is beyond the financial capacity of most criminal defendants, as well as the legal aid system which needs to carefully ration funds that could be allocated to other cases. And even when the funds are available, it’s unlikely that a defence expert, in the time it would take them to bill an average person’s annual income, could understand much about a sprawling enterprise accounting system that cost millions of pounds and has thousands of daily users:

> Defence accounting and IT experts were instructed. Detailed disclosure requests were made in respect of Horizon and its underlying data … On the other side of the scales, statements from Fujitsu employees attested to Horizon's reliability. Ultimately, the issue of Horizon's unreliability was not pursued at trial – possibly because the defence experts had struggled to understand the Horizon system.

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hamilton...

See paras 82 to 90.

Yes. You’ll find many results for the keyword ‘cellebrite’ on law.justia.com, canlii.org and austlii.edu.au. These free databases are far from comprehensive and most cases won’t go on appeal or end up in a legal research database at all, so this is just the tip of the iceberg.

> they would have made passwords a 4 digit pin if they had their way

There’s a well-known bank in Australia that has been doing this for years [1]. It’s very convenient, and if there was a significant fraud risk associated with it, you’d think they would have changed their policy by now.

[1] https://www.ing.com.au/securebanking/

What’s the experience of searching and editing your org-mode notes on your (presumably Android, since Syncthing doesn’t exist on iOS) phone like? I’ve been interested in org-mode for a while, but most advocates seem to spend all their time in front of a keyboard.

Deno uses ES6 modules, which are supported by modern browsers. There’s no node_modules. https://deno.land/manual/examples/import_export

The part I quoted is clearly about photos, not drawings. I think arguing that possessing child pornography should be legal is “defending behavior a reasonable person would identify as Paedophilia.” Your reference to the formal definition of “child” made me think that you were unaware that Stallman had argued for this, and were attributing his cancellation solely to his remarks about statutory rape.

> He directly addressed child pornography by saying that “making such photos should be a crime, and is a crime, but that is no reason to prohibit possessing copies of the photos.”

https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix

Some of RMS’s behaviour seems excusable, but I think a majority of the population would support the social norm by which anybody who publicly states that possession of child pornography should not be illegal [1] is disqualified from leadership positions. As far as I know, RMS has not resiled from this position, although he has conceded that the actual sexual abuse of children should be per se illegal.

[1] https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix

I think that case [1] is largely based on bribery, a recognised form of honest services fraud [2] for which it’s not necessary to prove that the defendant ‘obtained money or property.’

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admis...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honest_services_fraud

Thanks for prompting me to look a little further into this. Leaving aside the legal technicalities, I suppose there is a fundamental difficulty here in that academic cheating itself generally is not (and in my opinion shouldn’t be) dealt with as a legal issue. I think that it should be illegal to profit from it, but it does fundamentally differ from other kinds of fraud because the person who pays isn’t deceived, and the person who deceives isn’t paid.

The U.S. mail and wire fraud statutes are notoriously broad and on their face, seem to cover academic cheating services. Indeed, there is a precedent to this effect: United States v. International Term Papers, Inc., 477 F.2d 1277 (1973) [1]. However, I think it was overcome by the Supreme Court’s rejection of honest services fraud in 1987 [2]. While Congress reinstated the concept [3], the Supreme Court cut it down again in 2010, limiting it to bribery and kickbacks [4].

So that could explain why the newer online services haven’t been prosecuted federally. Several U.S. states have statutes explicitly dealing with this issue [5], but I suppose they are not being enforced for jurisdiction or resourcing reasons. Perhaps the newer legislation in Australia [6] and New Zealand [7] will be more effective.

[1] https://guides.law.fsu.edu/ld.php?content_id=4996427

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNally_v._United_States

[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skilling_v._United_States

[5] https://guides.law.fsu.edu/termpapermills/statutesandlegisla...

[6] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2020A00078

[7] https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1989/0080/latest/...

Why don’t these cheating services ever get investigated by the police? They are obvious, organised, profitable frauds. How is this any different to selling fake IDs or stolen usernames and passwords?

From what I can tell, the system in the US is significantly more complicated for individuals (mortgage interest deductions, 43 different state income taxes, “alternative minimum tax,” gift tax, estate tax...)

Why can’t you estimate the power consumption of the whole network and divide it by the number of transactions per second?

The same reason anaesthesia doesn’t make it okay to kill humans. There’s lots more on this in chapter 4 (“What's Wrong with Killing?”) of Singer’s Practical Ethics, if you’re interested.

This is ridiculous. Consciousness may be mysterious, but the fact that something emits sound when you break it doesn’t bring it into the same ethical domain as cows and other mammals with brains and an obvious desire and ability to avoid pain and death.

> The weakness of CSS is evident by how difficult it has been to properly center something within a container until relatively recently … you can't even really just target raw HTML+CSS+JS if you want to deploy something - you need a tool like webpack

This stuff was fixed at least 5 years ago. If you can drop support for IE11 (released in 2013 and no longer supported by Office 365), you’ll find that framework-free web development has improved massively since React was first released. And if you keep it simple and rely on what browsers support natively, you can achieve great performance.

According to what theory? This sounds like the law of large numbers, which depends on the assumption that the averaged random variables are independent and identically distributed. The history of speculative bubbles contradicts the idea that speculators act independently.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a working open wireless network (ie. no captive portal) in public, let alone been able to access one from my living room. Are they more common in other countries?

The only quotes attributed to the judge are:

– ‘Koh said she’s “disturbed” by Google’s data collection practices’

– ‘Koh said she finds it “unusual” that the company would make the “extra effort” of data collection if it doesn’t use the information to build user profiles or targeted advertising‘

– ‘The judge demanded an explanation “about what exactly Google does,” while voicing concern that visitors to the court’s website are unwittingly disclosing information to the company. “I want a declaration from Google on what information they’re collecting on users to the court’s website, and what that’s used for”’

None of this implies that this judge, who has specialised in litigation involving SV tech companies for a decade, can’t understand “basic aspects about web browsers.”

It’s strange that people are dismissing this judge as technically illiterate.

> Koh, 45, has become the de facto face of law in Silicon Valley. "She has an almost peerless reputation for fairness and efficiency in judging the issues of the 21st century," said Tracy Beth Mitrano, director of the Internet Culture, Policy and Law Program at Cornell University. "She gets the Internet in a way that other judges just don't," she said. "Our laws are so out of sync with current social norms and technology. What Koh represents is the hope that somebody gets it."

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/In-Silicon-Valley-Luc...

Freedom to modify is also not the same as a renewable 7-day licence to run up to 3 custom apps, as long as you maintain a $99/year subscription and a device that can run Xcode.

You mention that the JavaScript console has been used maliciously – doesn’t its continued existence show that we can put up a fence that’s good enough? Even the most locked down corporate PCs still provide access to the console. I’ve also never heard of anyone being tricked into rooting an Android device or enabling USB debugging.

> should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it?

No, because their failure to do this has no structural consequences for the market in ovens or space heaters. Apple’s control over the market for software that can run on 2 billion iOS devices, on the other hand, is a big deal. Some think it’s Apple’s just deserts for creating a platform that users like; others think the government should end that control using the antitrust laws passed to limit corporate power at this scale.

There have been at least five mass extinction events in the last 500 million years. The most recent one wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs, after they had dominated the earth for 100 million years. Tool-using apes with language have been around for less than 5 million. I think it’s far too early to say we’ll survive the next extinction event, or even make it that far before diverging into new species.