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> this seems very gimmicky in front of a judge.

It's always felt like engineers thinking they're outsmarting a much more mature legal system with humans built-in to slap away foolish gotchas.

The EFF seems to think warrant canaries would work, though, but under the premise that you can say "I've received some number of national security letters", just not "I've received this precise number of NSLs." That's an _entirely_ different line of thinking than every advocation of warrant canaries I've read.




> It's always felt like engineers thinking they're outsmarting a much more mature legal system with humans built-in to slap away foolish gotchas.

And then the engineers, unsatisfied with the messy world of human intervention, create a system without humans, where the "code is the contract" (ethereum). Then rapidly abandon that tenet at the first inconvenience and return to human discretion (DAO fork).


Because at the end of the day, non-fully-autonomous machinery are proxies for promises humans make to each other. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_theory)


This crypto-nerd approach with the legal system reminded me of https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png


I would have called https://xkcd.com/1494/


Great finding! :)




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