Just FTR, your critique is answered by Stefan Lucks, Norina Grosch, and Joshua Koenig's paper[0] from last year's langsec workshop at IEEE Security and Privacy. They define a formalism, calc-regular languages, to handle length-prefixed strings.
> The status quo: highly funded white people in a ranch house, obsessive dreams of white supremacy floating into the night...
Were you there? If not, then you're projecting. As it happens, the participants were at best plurality white. And no, the PoC weren't all Asians either.
Also, because Twitter requires short statements, there are multiple readings of "ignored" there. I see you're taking the least charitable one, i.e., "everyone let it slide." That interpretation is incorrect. People stopped talking to him. Isn't shunning what you progs want?
It's probably most accurate to say that gender isn't a significant factor in my calculus of attraction. I was born in Houston, though, and lived there for 23 years.
For what it's worth, I don't recall intending anything in particular with that list of adjectives, but you never really know about authorial intent.
The W3C working group will eventually produce a crypto API standard, though whether that standard will meet the requirements you describe remains to be seen. In particular, it exposes primitives (the proposed API can definitely be called in unsound ways), which a whole lot of people think is a terrible idea but which the standard editor seems bound and determined to ship. It's very frustrating.
I'd argue that in some cases there's a degree of control that can be developed, but also that this seems to be more the case for sensory triggers than for psychological ones.
I agree it's not the ideal UI. It's similar to what Darrell Issa's keepthewebopen.com was using with Madison, and to the marked-up texts that the EFF has produced as PDFs, but there's a cognitive jump (for me, at least) between "make a comment" and "propose a change".
Fundamentally, I want a user to be able to propose one or more changes by selecting a section of text and annotating it with a replacement. So there's a semantic difference between "comment" and "change". Furthermore, I also want to be able to easily select a changeset, then produce a draft output that integrates all changes from the changeset.
I think we can do this with co-ment's existing features and maybe a little bit of extra Django hackery, but before I go haring off into the internals, is this more like what you're thinking of?
Basically the way I view it is like this: we know that lawyers and hackers only have some overlapping domain expertise, but we'll need to work together in order to achieve good tech law reform and everyone's going to have to get out of their comfort zone to some extent. Whatever markup tool we deliver, a wide range of lawyers should be able to find it not too hard to use; hackers will be more unforgiving about a UI that has, say, latency issues (guilty look), but a good UI shouldn't have those anyway. Finding the right balance of user needs to satisfy with the resources we have available is of course going to be an ongoing process, so we're just gonna have to keep an active ear out for what people are asking for.
It sort of dovetailed with the aaronsw Noisebridge hackathon, but we started hacking on it independently about a day before. Christie, who's a Noisebridge member, realised the hackathon would be a good place to present it, and did. Via that, we met the http://hypothes.is/ guys, and things have continued to snowball from there :)
Right. The current annotation UI, co-ment, does all of its versioning in a database. Distributed version control provides certain advantages over this, ones that we'd like to bring in quickly, but it's vital that we convey our goals to both non-technical and technical audiences.
We're actually partial to darcs for this particular use case (the patch model is closer to how laws are actually amended), which ironically may decrease traction on the command-line since everyone has such a hard-on for git these days. IIRC you can use darcs via git, though.
forkthelaw.org dev here. What you're seeing now is a weekend prototype using banged-together open-source projects, focused on a UI experience for people more on the tech-law end of the spectrum (the Jennifer Granicks and Cathy Elliott Joneses of the world -- in fact, Cathy's helping us out with alpha testing). It's also specifically focused on the CFAA for timing reasons: in just under three weeks, I and a whole bunch of my infosec colleagues will be in DC for ShmooCon, so we can all go visit our representatives while we're in the area anyway.
Over the next few days we'll be building out the site with more information about the upcoming ShmooCon lobbying trip as well as our feature roadmap. The short version is that we'll be pulling the entire United States Code into darcs, updating it via GovTrack's APIs, and providing a UI to select and fork specific sections of the law for people to collaboratively work on.
The site's going to change quickly in the coming weeks as we add more functionality. Maybe we shouldn't have launched quite this early, but there is a bit of a time crunch.
Edit: IAC, if you're interested in more DVCS-like, offline/command-line functionality, I'm totally down to support that. Tell me more about how you'd expect to interact with that?
If Appelbaum is trying to educate the general public, he's doing a piss-poor job of it. Sagan, Dawkins and Chomsky approach[ed] the general public via the media and reach[ed] hundreds of millions of people. (Cosmos alone: over 500 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage) Appelbaum found himself a community numbering in the tens of thousands, rode the coattails of actual researchers to prominence by making minor contributions to their work and overplaying his role, and now rests on other people's laurels. He's only a big fish because this pond is so small.
Weev may not be the hero Gotham City needs, but he's the one Gotham City's stuck with. That's the thing about the judicial system; you go to court with the defendant you have.
The government may well have been counting on weev's reputation to work against him here. If your goal is to set a precedent that allows "unauthorized access" to be defined after the fact, you want a defendant people won't stand up for. It's much easier to turn bad law into bad case law when people don't fight back.
Depression is a horrible, horrible thing, both for those who experience it and the people who love them. Len was a brilliant, sensitive, loving man with the rotten luck to be too tormented by his own brain chemistry to realise how much he was valued by so many people, no matter how often we told him.
I'm his wife. Sadly, the reports are true; I've been visiting family in the States and I got the call from the Leuven police department a couple of hours ago.
He was the most brilliant man I ever met, and I still can't believe this is happening.
[0] http://spw17.langsec.org/papers.html#calc-regular