zboot 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (53) comment rss

  • On the post: Lessons From The Downfall Of A $150M Crowdfunded Experiment In Decentralized Governance

    zboot ( profile ), 29 Jun, 2016 @ 12:22pm

    That's why contracts aren't written in code

    Or some other logic/math/physics based language.

    It is hard to write code that defines behavior A and only allows A. Well, it's easy, but A is typically very trivial, and ensuring the only A part requires a lot of code as well.

    You're better off writing it in natural or legalese and enforcing it as a legal contract, where things like what both parties understood the agreement to mean become important and not what one party later to leverage the literal words on paper to mean.

    Essentially, a smart contract needs to be both code + unit tests + regression tests + acceptance tests. And it needs to have a non-code meta layer that essentially says, if it does something other than what we've agreed because the code is flawed, that action is outside the contract.

    It appears right now it's just the code portion. Unit tests let you know that your building blocks do what you want and only that one thing (mostly). Regression tests let you know that if you make a slight change somewhere, everything still works *like you already validated even if it doesn't seem like the change you made should affect anything else*. Acceptance tests essentially are the "everyone understands that X means ..." part of the contract. All of these "tests" are code BTW.

    Then when a contract violates this, you can easily point to the behavior that's outside the acceptance test, and thus in violation of the "contract" even though the current smart contract as written would let it happen.

    What's hilarious is that there's a whole "programming by contract" field which seems to have been ignored here.

  • On the post: 'Smart Grid' Company Demands MuckRock Turn Over Info On Anyone Who Might Have Seen Public Records Docs Involving It

    zboot ( profile ), 26 May, 2016 @ 01:18pm

    Re:

    This makes no sense at all. Trade secrets are not the problem that patents were invented to solve. I don't have hard numbers, but I suspect most (as in greater than 50%) trade secrets are not patent-able.

    In fact, that they gave this info to the city suggests it's not a trade secret at all.

    Trade secrets are just the excuse for getting this information hidden. They could have claimed copyright. Does that mean we should abolish that too? Because reading techdirt, I see report after report of problems "caused" by companies suing over copyright.

  • On the post: Guardian Tech Reporter: Apple Should Help FBI Break Into iPhone Because I Don't Consider Privacy All That Important

    zboot ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2016 @ 10:17pm

    Making Sense

    "So in the same way I’d argue we legalize drugs, why not have a careful, legal pathway to break into a phone?"

    This reads to me as: Many would argue that legalizing drugs is generally bad. Not only can illegal drugs screw you up, illegal drugs helps enriches criminals and leads to increased criminal activity, due to the vast sums of money involved. Legalizing illegal drugs, while perhaps not that palatable to many, is a good idea because it helps combat the criminal activity made possible by illegal drugs.

    Replace "illegal drugs" with "encryption" and "legalizing" with "backdooring".

  • On the post: John Legere Just Can't Stop The Misleading Bullshit About BingeOn

    zboot ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2016 @ 11:44am

    Re: Re: Detecting video in HTTPS is probably impossible

    I don't think you were involved with "building" the net. https encrypts content, not source or destination. HTTPS works over HTTP. So how exactly is it that they won't see the source of a given packet is youtube?

    Unless someone along the way is caching youtube and responding to t-mobile's requests, your comment doesn't make much sense.

  • On the post: It Must Be Christmas Time, Because Target Is Losing People's Personal Information Again

    zboot ( profile ), 18 Dec, 2015 @ 03:14pm

    Customers are asking for it

    They're named target. It's like being surprised to be kicked when you're hanging around the local Kick Me.

  • On the post: Marilyn Monroe Estate Trying To Use Trademark To Enforce Publicity Rights Court Said It Doesn't Have

    zboot ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2015 @ 09:02am

    To be fair, if this was Tupac, they might have a case. Is he really dead? Really?

  • On the post: US Counterterrorism Official Says US Is 'The Angel Of Death' And Should Be Target Killing ISIS Tweeters

    zboot ( profile ), 10 Sep, 2015 @ 02:32pm

    Re:

    Sure ZK, he might be a low-level soldier. But, the issue here is not that a soldier whose only job was tweeting was killed. The issue is the published sentiment, which is that the US should be justified in killing anyone who tweets something which is considered material support for ISIS.

  • On the post: Chicago's Secret Homan Square Detention Facility Way Worse Than Anyone Thought

    zboot ( profile ), 10 Aug, 2015 @ 05:32pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Do you have any proof for "They were preventing exclusively republican organizations from..." Because as far as I can see, there were very few "republican" organizations on that list. Unless you are co-opting conservative, tea party, and other groups as being "exclusively republican".

  • On the post: Chicago's Secret Homan Square Detention Facility Way Worse Than Anyone Thought

    zboot ( profile ), 10 Aug, 2015 @ 05:30pm

    Re: Re: IRS Targeting

    Yeah, thanks for the stats that the freaking article says can be misleading.

    There aren't stats on the total number of applications so if there were only 7 progressive groups that applied for such status, then that means 100% of progressive groups were vetted.

    Clearly, you did not actually look at the numbers.

  • On the post: Taylor Swift's Streaming Rant Nearly Identical To Garth Brooks' Used CD Rant

    zboot ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2015 @ 04:39pm

    Re: Re: Lets examine this

    Umm, no. You get to listen to them. You're paying x amount to listen to whatever songs you want (subject to being available from your streaming provider). That does not convey ownership of said songs. Furthermore, the amortized cost per "listen" is much less (as you'd expect) than the cost of ever purchasing any one song.

    So, you're not wasting a ton of money on crap music you don't want. As you get to choose the music and the cost to listen to unlimited amounts of music is much less than the costs to buy even a tiny fraction of said music.

  • On the post: Russian PSA: Quit It With The Selfies If You Want To Live

    zboot ( profile ), 10 Jul, 2015 @ 09:23am

    Hmm, I've got some pamplet ideas

    If you take a selfie running in front of a bus, you will get tired.
    If you take a take selfie running behind a bus, you will get exhausted.
    If you take a selfie in cathouse, you will soon find yourself in doghouse.
    If you take a selfie shooting off your mouth, you may find yourself losing face.
    A selfie jumping off a cliff is a leap to conclusion.

  • On the post: YouTube's Inane Response To Handing Popular YouTuber's Channel To Cosmetics Company: Blame The Algorithms

    zboot ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2015 @ 05:51pm

    Misleading Article

    Let's be clear about what happened. Mr. Lush did not lose his account. What happened is that google changed how it does urls on youtube.

    Before, his channel was available through the url youtube.com/user/lush which due to how youtube did redirecting, could also be accessed at youtube.com/lush

    Note, there was never an explicit agreement that the url youtube.com/lush was tied to his channel, it just so happened to work that way and people used it. The way countless programmers turn undocumented behavior in some platform into necessary features of their app.

    Anyway, youtube changed things to allow custom names/urls. Lush cosmetics got youtube.com/lush and the whole issue began.

    Note, you can still access Mr. Lush's channel at the original url. He still controls his account. Just the url hack that benefited him does so no longer.

    While there are certainly PR arguments to be made around to granting control of that URL officially to Mr. Lush, what actually happened and what this article (and comments) seem to imply happened are quite different.

  • On the post: Would It Have Been Better To Let The Indiana Religious Freedom Law Stand And Let The Internet And Free Market Work?

    zboot ( profile ), 16 Apr, 2015 @ 08:22am

    Re: Re: Historical amnesia.

    Hmm, then why do so many people seem to think it is ok for the government to have laws that violate my constitutional right to kill everyone I don't like?

    Clearly, we establish laws in part to punish behavior that we as a society feel is wrong. Just like we don't care about the hurt conscience of a psychopath serial killer, we also don't care about the hurt conscience of racists or homophobes.