Just your friendly resident federal prison alumnus—spent 18 months in prison for internet piracy and hacking. Interested in platform abuse, and intervention; speaker at Sleuthcon and InterCOP hosted by Interpol.
Aimless thoughts at https://josh.mn; prison stuff at https://josh.mn/prison.
Email is hn@the above domain.
meet.hn/city/us-Minneapolis
Submissions
Ask HN: Went to prison for 18 months, lost access to my GitHub. What can I do?
110 points·by joshmn··96 comments
Dorothy Molter
en.wikipedia.org
1 points·by joshmn··0 comments
Touchbar Pets
ahhzo.me
2 points·by joshmn··0 comments
YouTube enlists volunteers to moderate site via “YouTube Heroes” program
techcrunch.com
43 points·by joshmn··56 comments
Forbes Lowers Estimate of Theranos' Holmes' Net Worth from $4.5B to $0
forbes.com
3 points·by joshmn··0 comments
Show HN: Genius Annotations Button – Inspired by GitHubButtons
geniusbtn.com
7 points·by joshmn··2 comments
WhatSim: SIM card with unlimited global Whatsapp use
whatsim.com
3 points·by joshmn··0 comments
Ask HN: Looking for your input on a Docker/Dokku hosting service
1 points·by joshmn··1 comments
Ask HN: Who wrote your privacy policy, user agreement, and terms of service?
1 points·by joshmn··0 comments
Will the personalities of the RapGenius founders lead to their downfall? (2013)
quora.com
1 points·by joshmn··1 comments
Dear AirBNB, No thank you for the XXX Freak Fest
dearairbnb.tumblr.com
420 points·by joshmn··240 comments
If Satoshi Nakamoto has over 1,000,000 BTC, why doesn't he just sell it now?
13 points·by joshmn··12 comments
Ask HN: Is HumbleBundle's business model sustainable?
3 points·by joshmn··1 comments
Ask HN: Killer idea, no cash to build an MVP, what to do?
Sometimes I'll search LinkedIn for posts on internet piracy. It's usually companies or those affiliated with companies promoting their anti-piracy product—typically streaming. I'd wager about 90% of them are straight-up, uninspired LLM-generated slop.
And so I'll comment asking them why it's okay to use a tool that was built on the backs of content it wasn't properly licensed to use to generate a post promoting an anti-piracy product. I'm yet to get a good response, if any. (Sorry for the word salad.)
I'm hardly a sysadmin and I think Unraid is great. My usecase is some Docker containers and media backups. The UI gets the job done well, whereas Synology tries to dumb things down and make things pretty.
I ran the ATS myself and had a similarly quirky experience. I was in the 70s because it couldn't find my GitHub profile, and then it didn't like some of the popular Ruby libraries I'm the author of.
After a few runs it picked things up appropriately. I always got dinged on formal education though.
It's the digital equivalent of your house burning down, your devices are inside it, and you never bothered to bring the 2FA codes you definitely wrote down to the bank.
If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy):
I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :(
Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :)
Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?
I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have.
What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.
I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this.
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
I was in federal prison with Sebastien Raoult, one of the ShinyHunters guys. We were in the same unit and talked regularly.
I was about mid-way through my bid when another inmate told me "new guy in B3 is a another hacker." I got really excited—I'd have someone to talk shop with, at the very least.
My takeaway from him was that they're a bunch of contemporary "script kiddies" with a lot of time on their hands.
My dad spun up my Pentium Deschutes (400MHz!) machine the other day. Same hard drive from when I was 10 years old. “clouds.psd” was on the desktop.
I still remember retiring that computer. The first thing I did when I got my Pentium IV chip a year later was download Macromedia Dreamweaver. Did me well.
Aimless thoughts at https://josh.mn; prison stuff at https://josh.mn/prison.
Email is hn@the above domain.
meet.hn/city/us-Minneapolis