_Why’s work led me to where I am. At a crucial time in my life I found _Why. That put me on a path to learning Ruby and then a whole bunch of steps now I have an actual job as a web developer. I work in Python, but I’m sure _Why won’t mind.
Before I found _Why I wasn’t sure what to do with my career-life. He showed me that programming can be art and science.
_Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is what got me hooked. His quirky little foxes made it fun to just burn through the whole book and left me with enough knowledge to be useful, and able to ask the right questions to learn more.
It was just the right kick at the right moment, and he will have a place in my heart forever.
His Wikipedia entry reminds me of this quote from him:
"programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more"
... and I can't help but think that this experience is disproportionately part of the Ruby community he was embroiled in. I did some Ruby-on-Rails development back in the day, and yeah... It's all completely un-runnable now. But that mostly seems to be a Rails-specific issue, where the ecosystem was downright hostile to calcification of APIs, workflows, and core tools. A person could publish a whole book and have 50% of its recommendations obsoleted within two years. That has to be demoralizing for an educator and communicator. Contrast that massively with Windows binaries that still run that were built against operating system versions that existed before college graduates were born.
Various other ecosystems lack the high-speed code churn problem. I think even the Ruby ecosystem has cooled from its white-hot molten state a decade ago.
Pick your poison. Either you evolve your language to keep people interested and old code becomes stale and eventually stops working, or you don't and you lose your community and interest in the language, like Perl.
We run twenty year old Perl scripts on new hosts at work all the time, with little to no change required in them. We have lots of microservices written in Perl over the last decade or more, and those generally have very little to no problem being ported to new systems as well. The problem now? Finding people that know Perl or want a job writing it.
It doesn’t have to be that way. 10 years since Go 1 and almost all Go programs written then will run correctly, unchanged, against Go 1.19. It takes a lot of effort but the effort pays off big time. Any programming language that wants to survive the test of time should push hard on maintaining compatibility imo.
I think people lost interest in Perl because Python was just a better language for a lot of people’s use cases (and arguably a lot less mysterious). And the focus on Perl 6 (now Raku) arguably distracted a lot of people from Perl 5 and then took too long to mature. (At least that’s how it looked from my outside perspective.)
I wasn't very clear, but I view this specifically as something interpreted languages have to deal with far more than compiled languages. Compiled languages have a slightly different set of trade offs that make this less of a problem (less, but not nonexistent).
> Python was just a better language for a lot of people’s use cases
I won't argue that about the short term, but long-term? Long-term the difference in policy in how it deals with changes ends up at exactly the problem we're discussing. The fact that (IMO) pyenv and virtualenv are needed to manage python deployments in any sane way is evidence of this.
Long-term a lot of projects that ended up using Python would likely have been better served by Perl because of the expected target and lifecycle of the programs in question. There are a lot of aspects of languages which aren't necessarily the thing people were thinking of at the time that they do think of now, because of very negative examples. Examples such as package distribution, which Javascript has had numerous problems with in the past with NPM, and Python occasionally still struggled with (I'm looking at you, pip, and your CLI search interface brokenness).
These days new languages take package management and deprecation policies and cycles and how to deal with long-term stability extremely carefully, because of the examples of Perl and Python and Javascript, etc. At least the ones that plan to have any real adoption do. Rust is a somewhat recent example of that. Look at all the effort they put into making sure they got those aspects as correct as they could and communicated them well to users. I don't think Rust would have nearly as many people using it or interested in it if they didn't give those the importance they did (I imagine C# and Java are similar, but I follow news about them somewhat less).
An exception is C++, which HN loves to hate, but has managed to remain mostly backwards-compatible while evolving into a modern language and maintaining a large community.
It's not that I think reading it is necessarily bad, but Perl does shift the onus of writing from making it correct to making it legivlem later. It's easy to write correct perl code, there's often many ways to do it because the language tries to do what you want for you. That unfortunately makes it harder to read, as when not in the exact same frame of mind, those shortcuts the language does for you are harder to intuit later.
I think the total amount of effort required to write good legible code is about on par with it's contemporary languages if you take the time to write it well, but it's hard to resist being able to write it quickly and be done because it's easy to ignore the problem of tomorrow you're creating by being so quick and productive today.
Are you being serious? Have you tried to get a "modern JS app" or Python web app running (safely, w/o massive security vulnerabilities) that is even a few years old?
All code rots, and it rots quickly. Its the a reality of modern software.
I am able to build, run, and use oneko-1.1 from 1995, unmodified on a MacBook M1 Max. It's been almost 30 years, but that cat is still cute when it chases the mouse cursor!
This may be a bit of an extreme example, but generally the unix-y APIs have been relatively stable over the decades, including X11 as we see.
If you want to try for yourself, you need XQuartz (to have X11 in the first place), and imake from e.g. homebrew, because it's apparently not part of the XQuartz distribution. Don't forget to start XQuartz. That's all.
Yes, agreed, this is nothing more than a cute toy, and not anywhere close to a full-blown productivity application. But it does show some fundamental API (and language) stability, and especially with X11 in the mix I really had anticipated more problems.
It's not even a particularly cherry-picked example. One day a few years ago, I suddenly remembered that cat, and went out to see if I can still find it. I tried to build it more just for kicks and remember being surprised when it not only "just built", but even "just ran", on my Mac, for which it wasn't even for.
Yeah, something bigger will most likely push back more, especially as soon as more dependencies than just the C library itself and X11 come into play. Though overall my track record in building ancient C stuff with an acceptable amount of changes is pretty good!
It's the unfortunate reality of software, but it's not an immutable law.
The Microsoft example is important. I've never been a fan, but I stand in grudging respect for what they've accomplished with their products as far as backwards compatibility goes, which has significant and enduring value.
Emulators are another example of how software can be long-lived with the right attention.
Personally, I think we have operating environment conceptions all wrong. We continually pay for or fête new versions and thus incentivize change for change's sake. We might do better to respect or even pay for continuing compatibility.
> The Microsoft example is important. I've never been a fan, but I stand in grudging respect for what they've accomplished with their products as far as backwards compatibility goes,
I was a PM for Visual Basic back in the day. A huge amount of work was done within dev and Office to work around problems with Adobe, Borland, etc. so that compat wasn't broken. It was frustrating and heartening.
It is incredibly sad that many/most games that were released for Mac or Linux more than about 4 years ago will run better in an emulated windows environment on those platforms than they will natively (if they run at all).
I think Windows' focus on backwards compatibility is part of what made it the default gaming platform on personal computers. Macs will never be a serious platform for gaming, even if they begin offering more performance, as long as they keep their obsession with wiping the slate clean and throwing developers off every 5-10 years or so. (I mean... 680x0, PowerPC, Mac OS X, x86, 64-bit-only, Apple Silicon, just how many breaking transitions do they have to go through?)
Nobody's trying to argue that python and javascript aren't terrible, just that there are other languages and APIs that are standardized and maintained by people who prioritize reliability over following dumb trends that bloggers come up with.
C is a great example of this. Even if the ABI changes, in the worst case scenario a well-written C program only needs to be recompiled.
I wonder what intrinsic quality makes a language long lived, rather
than blame communities and whatnot.
Another stalwart is Pure Data, the DSP language I am very fond
of. It's based on atomic principles. Indeed the primitive processing
elements are called Atoms, being irreducible ops like multiply, add,
sin and cos. There really isn't much that can change. For C as for
LISP, especially Scheme, it's hard to break them down any further, yet
they are high enough level to be useful for programming. There's some
sweet-spot to be found.
Ha, I just wanted to bring up Pure Data as example. It takes backwards compatibility very seriously. Patches written 20 years ago should run just fine on any recent Pd version. In fact, Miller Puckette strives for at least 50 years of support. Pd just had its 25th anniversary, so there are at least 25 more years to go :-)
This isn’t entirely true about Clojure, because there are things that have broken as new Java versions have come out (especially with modules and exports etc). Obviously you can still run Java 8 if you want though.
This can happen, but it's not very common in my experience. E.g., I tried an early version of Clojure (1.0, I think) on Java 13 and it ran just fine, although I didn't seriously test it
Sure, I wouldn't expect clojure.core to break ever. Maybe we'll get some future version based on Project Loom and that'll require some thought.
But I've had to work out weird command line incantations for various libraries that touch crypto or JavaFX namespaces. And things like Quil are still in a weird state on modern JVMs.
I just found some of my C and C++ code from around 2001. I just needed to add one missing prototype I'd let be implicit in my sloppiness, and it all built and ran just fine.
I'm currently bulding a SPA to replace a 25 year old X Window app. That app still builds on modern Linux systems despite being unmaintained during that time. Seeing that old CVS repo brought back some memories. The customer wants to modernize.
By comparison, the SPA is a nightmare of tooling and dependencies that will be unsupportable in a few years without constant maintenance and updating.
It is, actually. Well, "class" and "super" were never legal even before they became keywords, because the language was designed to evolve and those were obvious things which might be useful later. But "await" still works as a variable name outside of an async function, even today, precisely so that old code still works as it used to. There are some contortions in the specification (and implementations) required to make this work, but it does work. (I am one of the current editors of the JS specification.)
Modern JS apps I encounter are packaged up with npm and I rarely have trouble running them.
Python, I agree, is a challenge. I don't use it. I used to; I concluded it was too much hassle most of the time to maintain my Python working against other people's Python. Coupled with the lack of static type checking, I pulled it off my quick-grab list years ago (though with the growth of mypy, pip, and conda I may revisit it some day if I get bored with my current tools).
Go code is pretty stable. Java seems downright calcified. And, of course, the whole C library space may as well be igneous stone. You can get FFTW version 3, for example, built from the relatively recent date of last year, but FFTW has a version 2 stable release dating back to 1999.
JS apps nowadays have so many layers that often something breaks over time or if you run it with the wrong version of node.
Frontend post react is an absolute nightmare:
My experience with a fleet of semi abandoned next.js static websites is pretty terrible: just in months something stops working in my pipeline on vercel and I need to spend time to debug it. Running things locally is even worse, I just change the code, push and hope for the best.
Python is a downright nightmare: between 2vs3 and pip, egg, venv, I usually just salvage the code I need and try to make it work or convert it to something saner (eg. I did that with an opencv algorithm I found - I just transposed it to rust + the same opencv api calls). My favourite story happened literally 2 days ago. I was trying to install a dependency (keras_ocr) and I kept failing on some dependency; I tried installing that dependency manually and it worked but no success on installing keras_ocr. Eventually I updated pip and it started working.
I had huge problems running old Go software, I think I succeeded once after a lot of pain and gave up the other times.
I had fairly good results with ancient C, C++, Java and Haskell.
Probably because they started before we had cool and glamorous developers on twitter selling you a course and not maintaining his 200 leftpad libraries.
I'm curious to see where Rust will sit in a few years.
I could've been more clear in my original post. I'm not just thinking about "getting an app running": ruby, rbenv, and bundler has had that solved for many years, and npm, nvm (or whatever and js is stable there as well.
If you take any app built three years ago, you are going to have critical security vulns in libraries you depend on. With java think of the log4j fiasco. With Ruby there are nokogiri or rails things. With javascript there are probably at least a handful of downstream packages that have pretty big security issues. Now you have to update dependencies, and then the real fun begins.
If it a walled-off intranet app on a VPN, or a small CLI app, sure, maybe you can ignore that issue. But if its a public web or mobile app that is gonna see real use, you are going to have to head down the security audit + package update rabbit-hole.
For what I do in my day-to-day, security vulnerabilities are reported by `npm` automatically when updating packages and there are several pieces of nice tooling around identifying the versions that exhibit the vulnerability and getting around them.
I think the `npm` community is going in the right direction and learning from mistakes of the past on this topic.
I mean, bundler goes back a pretty far distance into the history of rails at this point and has been the defacto mechanism of dependency control for ruby for most of its history by now, so barring old gems being yanked you should be able to run any rails app with a lockfile if you also find the right ruby version.
Js (or specifically npm) and python were far slower to adopt this convention, to the point that I think it's fair to say that neither have fully adopted it yet.
Js at least has made almost no backwards incompatible syntax or core lib changes though, which is a point in its favor. Ruby 2 and python 3 were major breaking changes.
For JavaScript, I generally assume backwards-incompatible changes are a non-starter because of its embedding into the browser as its killer app. At this point, we really don't know what websites will break if backwards-incompatible JS changes are made.
Ironically, this has made JS a very stable language (though APIs do occasionally drop out or change drastically for security reasons).
I have a VERY old rails project that I started back in 2005 when Rails was like version 0.8 (when migrations were just a series of .sql files you ran in order). I continued working on it for a few years and by the time I stopped, I had upgraded it rails 2.1.
I recently wanted to play around with it again, and I was able to get the entire thing running in Kubernetes. You can find docker images for Ruby 1.8.7 still, and the Rails 2.1 gems still installed fine. It might not be up to date security wise, but it runs!
Why to me contrasts a huge proportion of todays body of new programmers. Instead of the pursuit of programming as a means to a profession, career or livelihood, Why embodied programming as something to be pursued for the wonderment and satisfaction of being able to use a computer to make or model things real or imagined.
This is true; it's no wonder that a lot of people in the arts (or explorers like climbers) come from wealthy backgrounds.
For most of us, music or climbing is a hobby that needs to be fit in somewhere in their normal schedules. And when it comes to IT, writing, learning, and things like open source are often also spare (sparse?) time activities.
Which is a shame, I like to think I could write decent blog posts or even books but I never have (or take) the time. I have a passing hobby in music but that too never really takes off beyond noodling.
I don't know _why, and never did, but the little cadre of characters he invented and the care and heart he put into his various works were literally what convinced me (at one of my lowest points) that my life was still worth living. And for that reason, I will always remain grateful to _why.
So then what happens if someone's anonymity is stripped away? Do they sue the de-anonymizer, or does the de-anonymizer face criminal penalties? Or both? How does one determine an appropriate penalty for this sort of thing? Does it matter if the victim made themselves stupidly easy to dox?
"It oughtta be illegal" is easy to say but not so easy to actually make happen.
Absolutely it should be a criminal offence to doxx people. If someone isn’t committing a crime and prefers to use a pseudonym, more power to them. If you deliberately publish their identity without permission, to the deepest layer of Hell for you.
In the middle are various levels of negligence and poor handling of PII which should attract severe punishment to provide economic incentive to protect PII or simply not collect it in the first place.
Like I said, it’s not a popular opinion, but assuming it was a popular opinion, what would stop it from being a reality?
(To be clear, I have no reason to believe it will ever be a popular opinion, nor do I see the point in even trying to make it one; that said, not aware of any fundamental reasoning of why it’s impossible.)
What stops it from being a reality is the lack of concrete answers to the questions raised by the comment you're replying to. Which you too have elected not to answer.
Nothing in that comment was specific enough to respond to, but sure, my here are my responses which are unnecessarily verbose due to the generality of the questions, assuming it was popular and supported belief; again, all the responses you referred to were “generally speaking, how would xyz be done” — not specific statements saying “x is not possible because of y”, which would actually result in a narrow well defined exchange:
>> So then what happens if someone's anonymity is stripped away?
It would be impossible in any significant way, since it would be impossible to digitally identify any entity without having there prior consent; something that’s easily possible with existing technology. If person revoked that permission, retaining data would be illegal, even for the government. If government needed to identify someone, it would be done systematically and anonymously; for example, if a person needed to pay taxes, access a controlled area, etc - it would all be done anonymously with persons consent, if they decline to provide the required anonymous digital tokens, response would be predefined, and would include being deported to an exiled region.
>> Do they sue the de-anonymizer, or does the de-anonymizer face criminal penalties? Or both?
Both.
>> How does one determine an appropriate penalty for this sort of thing?
Person loses access to modern technology, is deported, would be unable to reach anyone once deported, and would never be allowed to return.
>> Does it matter if the victim made themselves stupidly easy to dox?
No, blaming victim is obviously irrational.
_____
Again, if there specific issues other than it not being a popular opinion, please let me know. Otherwise, like I said, an individual being able to control their identity is limited only by popular opinion.
> Person loses access to modern technology, is deported, would be unable to reach anyone once deported, and would never be allowed to return.
So this person should get a penalty which in some ways is more severe than what murderers get?
> No, blaming victim is obviously irrational.
Okay, but I mean, if I publish my own name and address in a public space, and then someone else who doesn't like me takes that information and republishes it in a manner I disapprove of, is that person still a doxer?
That's an extreme example but doxing almost never involves information which is not already publicly accessible to someone stubborn enough. It just involves following threads, correlating information, using public databases, etc.
>> So this person should get a penalty which in some ways is more severe than what murderers get?
Being deported is way more humane than imprisonments. Personally, to me, being controlled than governments, corporations, etc logging my identity and any other information as they want is from of control I neither agreed to, nor would and would happily deport myself to a country than did not.
>> if I publish my own name and address in a public space, and then someone else who doesn't like me takes that information and republishes it in a manner I disapprove of
That would not be possible, at least in a significant way; any directly or indirectly identifiable information digitally published would require approval and would be revocable.
___
Again, might point is two parts: (1) people would never agree to this; (2) but if they did, there is nothing I am aware of the would make it impossible.
Absolutely. Sometimes people get known, against their will, for events beyond their control. There is an example that comes to mind of a crime being interrupted by a member of the community. The criminal was not named but the person who thwarted the crime was. They perceive this as having had a negative influence on their career search, as the first thing that appears when searching their name on mainstream search engines is "Person from X city, apprehended during Y crime".
Is this okay? Should this person have a right to "be forgotten"? Even if we assume this person could somehow articulate a manner, method and value of negative impact this association has caused, is there a correct avenue to address this?
- The news outlets are not doing anything wrong, they largely have reported only facts. They're precluded from mentioning the perpetrator by name, and the good Samaritan is reported by name as having intervened in the crime and preventing it from escalating; these are indisputable facts.
- Is the person reviewing job applicants to blame for possibly not going past the title of an article when searching a prospect's name and city?
Unfortunately as reality here has shown, there is no correct way forward. Legislatively, the USA does not hold the rights of the good Samaritan above the Constitutional rights of the press and witnesses. Imagine the feelings that develop in the good Samaritan in realizing they're powerless against the public record while having done nothing wrong and being accused of no crime.
at ruby conferences he attended, folks would offer him a ride back home, so he'd have them like, drop him off at a park near his house or at a street corner. all of his talks and writing was written as "_why," and his event namebadges carried his screen name as well.
i remember thinking that one of the reasons why he "disappeared" in 2010 was because some folks were trying very hard to uncover his real-world identity
Yes, _Why (and his wife) for sure were doxed and it included information like their home address. For long time, his name was actively removed from online pages that mentioned _Why, but at some point the removals stopped; for example, the Wikipedia page for _Why.
Not only horrifying, but more often than not, being doxed is followed by progressively worse experiences like: malicious lawsuits, false accusations, stalking, unwanted potential harmful mail, random visitors, death threats, swattings, physical harm, etc — not only against the person doxed, but others who are of significance to them.
I was doing something with hpricot at one of my first jobs when he disappeared. I went to the docs page (was it on Github at the time?), and then a couple minutes later I went back to check something else out, and everything was gone. I assumed it was something intermittent in the moment; I can't remember how or when I figured out what had actually happened.
You can control your presentation of an identity and you can kill it. However, you cannot stop others from resurrecting it and remembering it. This is the lie of copyright.
for some folks, this sort of doxxing carries severe real-world consequences.
think of someone who's trans for example: it isn't always possible to update names on government documents because of dumb state laws, so discovering and exposing (say) a coworker's "legal name" could out them as trans and cost them their job.
Unless their job requirement is tied to their gender, I don't think being a trans person is listed as "legal fire-able offences" unless you can also be fired for being one gender or another.
No _why still owns the copyright on them and if you try to republish them in violation of any license they put on them (like requiring attribution, etc.) then you are in violation of their copyright and the law.
The files and such may live forever, but your ability to publish them, reproduce them, etc. is only allowed if you were granted a license to do so.. i.e. if _why published them under a permissive or open source license.
You’re explaining this to someone who undoubtedly knows that, and is making a different point than you think (which is that it doesn’t matter).
We all know what copyright is. We all know nobody cares online, too. Those of us who remember the work when published originally also know that you’re making an argument that _why would hate you making, and that they consciously chose to avoid through how they published. I can tell how you’re arguing here that you don’t remember or didn’t know _why’s preferences, which is itself somewhat disrespectful.
Stick to the respect, which is an interesting thought to consider, and spare the copyright litigation. It’s honestly tedious.
No one other than _why can say what their intentions and desires for their works are.
The exact same argument you're making is what someone who would steal _why's work and charge money to republish it would make. Imagine if someone ganked the poignant guide to ruby and it became a NYT bestseller... can they just say "oh this is what _why would have wanted, for more people to read this" and walk away with all the profits?
Copyright is there for a reason, to protect the owner of a work. If _why chooses to do so they can go after anyone republishing their work for money or not.
It's not disrespectful to argue that putting something on the internet doesn't make it public domain, no matter what _why thought or thinks. If _why doesn't want it taken down, he won't ask them to take it down. That doesn't mean that conversations about whether things put the internet become publicly owned, even sparked by someone bootlegging a defunct site under the original domain name, have to hinge on what _why thinks.
Or whether things put on the internet are any more publicly owned than books, television shows, or movies, which can all easily be put on the internet (and which everybody agrees is extremely problematic irt the law.)
edit: also, this really reeks of weird parasocial hero worship unless you know the man and have asked him about it.
He discussed his preferences on copyright. It’s projecting a weird kind of parasocial hero worship to assume I meant otherwise despite my not giving you a single shred of evidence on my opinion of him. I actually detest your little edit because you’ve charged my opinion and put me on a defensive footing regarding my opinion of somebody who I honestly couldn’t care less about (sorry; wasn’t my scene). I worked very hard to avoid saying that because I know he’s loved and my opinion doesn’t matter. But you had to make me say it.
I’ve not written a single line of Ruby in my life and even I know his thoughts on copyright and public domain and intellectual property, is the point. I actually hate how many people worship him like he’s Jesus because the content is more interesting than the person, which is the case for pretty much anyone creative and has nothing to do with him. (Something tells me he’d vibe on that take, too, given how he left.)
They are also doing this to Dan Price, an alleged sexual predator and rapist. he was famous for the $70,000 / year minimum salary policy. It's bizarre to see this much idolization and moral policing online.
And back to the parent's comment and others regurgitating the same circular logic: We know its not public domain on legal term but we are saying it might as well be because of the irreversible nature of making any content publicly available on the internet which more or less is identical to putting your content in public domain.
I suspect a lot of this rigid thinking and hyper sensitivity to word is spectrum behavior and I am already seeing several people.
This is like people arguing people who pirate should be put in prison. I wonder what type of world they live in to be this rigid and black & white thinking. Must be quite isolating
As a matter of legality, that's wrong, of course. This is copyright violation. For whatever that's worth.
But I think the bigger point is, if you're a fan of WTLS, it seems very odd to be so disrespectful of WTLS's desires. I can only conclude the the party who put up the archive is someone who wants to hurt WTLS's feelings, or at least is quite willing to do so.
You can't take back what you publish in public domain which is what happens when you publish content on the internet. You may own the copyright in technically but it would be freely shared and distributed on the internet with your only recourse being submitting DMCA notices to platforms. Youtube does this very well but only because they are required to by large corporations that can litigate.
The average HN user who posts blog content and deletes it is not going to be able to stop it from being distributed. Technically they own the copyright to its content but the end result would be identical to if he or she had announced it to be in public domain. Anybody anywhere could freely share and publish its content on platforms without any consequences unless you notify the platform with DMCA notice and it would be largely up to the discretion of the platform to comply or not as many hosting services explicitly advertise such "bulletproof" hosting.
Your own take on what's moral and not has no bearing here since we don't know how the author feels about his work being shared. Yeah I get it that he has copyright to it but its not exactly enforceable on the internet.
Everything on the internet is not assumed to be public domain. In fact if you don't put any license on it then it is assumed to be de facto copyright material and other people can't republish it without your explicit permission.
Things like the Internet Archive have an opt-out process rather than opt-in. The extent to how the IA operates within the law isn't clear to me, but it does suggest that the case isn't as open-and-shut as you make it seem.
And their opt-out policy for books was ended after their extremely-optimistic ploy to parlay becoming America's covid library into a general weakening of copyrights. I don't even know if they have an opt-in process for the copyright holders of books.
Yes I'm aware. But opt-out remains for web sites, which are also copyrighted. The difference is that books had a powerful entity arguing their case. So I think my point stands.
Bill Clinton signed the DMCA law into effect at the start of the internet boom because somebody could have power to shutdown a platform because their doodle got shared. Then they could go after the host, and even the software providers. To prevent these recursive litigations that could easily have malicious intent (competition uploading copyright material to your platform to shut you down), the DMCA safe harbour was born.
Internet Archive operates the same way, if they receive DMCA notice, they need to comply in order to keep the safe harbour process.
As to whether WTL will file a DMCA to take down his material, it looks unlikely. For whatever reason he suddenly wanted to be out of limelight and I get the feeling that he doesn't care much whether his work is shared or not but who knows, maybe he will come out of the woodwork to raise his voice (which would be in contrast to his reclusive state).
He really is a mysterious figure and even more mysterious is the sheer amount of effort he put into his work and passion to share it suddenly relinquished overnight, out of whim? stress? depression? We can only guess.
Yes, and I think this runs counter to the parent poster I was responding to claiming that things like the IA "can't" do what they've been doing for decades. They can. And the people hosting this web site can do it too. They might get a DMCA notice, absolutely, in which case, maybe they'll still be able to host the content. It's a grey area. The parent poster was speaking in very clear absolutes and thus, IMO, misrepresenting the situation.
I think they are opt-out because Wayback Machine would be very incomplete if it required opting in. They are just willing to deal with legal issues that occur due to this policy.
They have removed web sites before due to copyright claims and have a DMCA claim process.
The internet is no different than any other public domain. If you send nude pictures to your partner and they leak it, there is an implicit understanding that it is intended to be private and they can be held liable.
However, the platforms and websites that publish that leak cannot be held accountable nor are they beholden to any agreement between you and your partner. Simply because there is no explicit /implicit agreement outside those two parties.
The same logic applies to whatever material you publish on the web. Once it enters public domain, you've relinquished the control over its distribution. The principle here is that once you publish to a public domain and while you can claim copyright and take down the material using DMCA, as long as the platform complies they are granted safe harbour and you are not going to be able to claim damages especially if you did not commercialize it. Even if a game you were selling were distributed online, it would be very tough to stop or go after platforms that hosted it.
Following the "partner leaked pictures" scenario, the opinion of courts with precedent ruling is that it demonstrates an explicit boundary between the parties involved in the original leak of the picture who are known to each other vs third parties that consume it who have no idea what agreements took place between them. Damages to the partner that leaked it can be held responsible but neither the platform or its audience. Even if they monetized the content, they would not be at fault because there is no implicit/explicit agreement once those leaks enter the public domain.
I don't know why we are getting side tracked with leaked nudes scenario but the gist of it is that only your partner that leaked your nudes are liable. If he/she uploads and it enters public domain and is shared amongst the entire cities spanning the globe the platform and its audience cannot be held responsible because of the lack of implicit/explicit agreement between the subject in the photo and the original distributor.
> it remains a violation of copyright for him or anyone else to post them without your permission, and damages can be claimed.
You can file DMCA to take down the photos and you can claim damages from the leaker, not the people who distributed it after the fact and the platforms that monetized and hosted the content.
Otherwise we would not be able to enjoy websites like xvideos or pornhub, who would take down the photos/videos if requested through DMCA but would not be liable for further dissemination nor will its audience.
Simply said and put: Once you put out content in the public domain or view, you lose control of it, and you cannot put the cat back in the bag. Copyright laws and right to privacy IS NOT going to change this principle.
You are confused, 'public domain' is an explicit legal definition of a work being licensed for any use. You have to explicitly put a work into public domain. Just uploading something to a server people can access for free does not make the work 'public domain'.
Think about it... if the opposite were true then I could watch or download a TV show from Hulu for free and claim I own it and rebroadcast it to others while charging them money. That's not how it works though, just because I watched it for free doesn't mean it's public domain and I am free to do whatever I want with it.
yes in aware of the technicality but here nobody really cares. if you publish it and its posted on reddit or some other forum all you can do is hope the web host respects your DMCA notice. Often the process is offputting that most would not bother and claiming damages is even more expensive and difficult with very low chance of success.
putting it in public domain or publishing it on the internet results in the same outcome, you lose control over it's access and distribution. its even worse because if you try to censor it or known to litigate, it would cause streisand effect.
you are not hulu and you cannot afford the legal costs. even then it still doesn't stop torrent websites from hosting your content and distributing it.
"Public domain" isn't a smart way of saying "things that people have seen publicly" it's a legal term. You're confidently wrong about every single point you've made here. Including the first: if you send your boyfriend nude pictures, and also post them on the internet for the public to see, it remains a violation of copyright for him or anyone else to post them without your permission, and damages can be claimed.
More damages could be potentially claimed if the pictures your ex are posting are pictures you sell commercially, in fact, because you've demonstrated that those photos have value and that you depend on your copyrights to make a living.
You are repeating what rest of us know but the outcome here is exactly the same as you would when you declare it a public domain. You lose control over its distribution.
You are also wrong on the scenario with leaked photos. The partner who leaked is liable not the rest of us who view it and share it.
Your last sentence also couldn't be further from the truth. Someone who is making ad revenues also isn't at fault and compliance with DMCA notice would be enough for them to continue operating.
The scale of the Internet makes it, in the general case, impossible to prevent such re-hosting somewhere, at some level of publicity.
Of course, as per the laws of most countries it is also a copyright violation and the copyright holder can absolutely sue for such behavior, with penalties ranging from a legal obligation to cease to host the content to damages.
I think _why is only slightly more likely to sue over these materials than William Gibson is to sue over the text of Agrippa, the "ephemeral poem" whose text was recovered and sent all over the internet shortly after its release.
True; instead it is explicit. This isn't controversial at all, in typical jurisdiction unless explicitly released into public domain the author retains all copyright - your consuming one of those copies gives you no further rights at all.
As a matter of practicality, it probably wont be acted on. Unless there is enough money involved to go after such copyright violations, it's unlikely anyone will bother...
They teach stories in high school these days that came from manuscripts Franz Kafka explicitly demanded be burned upon his death. It is, perhaps, disrespectful.
Perhaps we all disrespect him with every new generation of students.
Perhaps that's a strangely fitting fate for the man who is the namesake of the term "Kafkaesque." I'd like to hope he'd laugh, but I know only the writings and not the man.
Ironically enough, _why's last act "CLOSURE", he talks about how he read everything by Kafka, even the deleted stuff. So I have to hope he wouldn't have a problem with someone creating this archive to keep his deleted writings alive.
Did _why take them offline because he didn’t want anyone to read them?
I thought it was more like a book going out of publication—there’s no desire from the author that people should stop reading it, just that it’s out of the author’s hands.
I don’t know if _why ever expressed a desire that people shouldn’t go back and read his writing.
It is assumed but not proven that _why's final thoughts about killing that pseudonym are captured in CLOSURE [1].
There's a lot of different takeaways from that and other contemporary writings of _why. Some of them are that _why wished to pursue the Right to Be Forgotten, not just in the GDPR terminology sense, but in a "Last Chance to See" existential way. Those impressions yield that _why watched the internet transition from "pseudonyms are fine and ephemeral" to "everyone knows your real name and pseudonyms are permanent fixtures in the modern internet" and tried as hard as possible to kill everything about that pseudonym as Performance Art. As a reminder of an internet long gone. As a reminder of a Right to be Forgotten.
From that perspective, this archive is maybe a bit of putting a Banksy into the Louvre. It's out of context, it's maybe against the artist's wishes, it's kind of weird and over-pedestalizing a legendary figure.
(Arguably _why's last stand failed to account for that little last bit, that human tendency even older than the internet of myth making and legend building. As this shows, as the history of mentions of _why on HN alone every few months shows, legends loom large in culture and _why was already a part of the programming legendarium before he tried to murder that pseudonym.)
It's a pretty good guess, he has been found, reached out to, etc. He just wants to move on from that time in his life.
So it must feel really weird to him that people go to so much trouble to keep his old texts alife. It's like the whole _why thing is now completely separate to him and it's now about the idea of him and people care more about the idea of _why. It kinda feels like making a tribute site/song/whatever to your first love years a decade later.
when I wrote about exit in open communities ("410 Gone - Infocide in Open Content Communities") 10 years ago, I included the _why case, and here his work is restored a decade later!
