News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany by AnthonyMouse on Saturday March 03, 2018 @10:40PM (#16513136)
> Those points can't be picked apart like you did. They add up

Others are doing a fine job of taking apart the specifics, but it's important to understand why this form of argument is itself a fallacy.

Inference works by taking into account new evidence and using it to adjust the probability with which you believe something to be true. So if you see Bob wearing a red shirt, you are more likely to believe that Bob owns a red shirt. Could still be that he has borrowed it or something, but it's now more likely he owns one than it was previously. By contrast, if you go all through Bob's bedroom and find zero red shirts, that makes it less likely, even though it's still possible he owns one that isn't in his bedroom.

The problem with allowing plaintiffs or prosecutors to play this game is that they can take the list of everything you've ever done, ignore everything that makes what they're trying to prove less likely and present only the list of things that make it more likely. If you look only at that evidence then each piece of it increases the probability that you believe what they want you to believe, regardless of whether it's actually true. How guilty they can make you look is directly proportional to their level of resources in finding things that make you look bad, independent of your actual guilt.

> I really didn't know. .de is very common in Germany.

Most countries have .co.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk, etc. The US doesn't have those. US companies use .com, .org, .net, etc. regardless that they're nominally not US-specific.

Re:Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany by icebraining on Sunday March 04, 2018 @04:15AM (#16513902)
The US does have .us - it was actually the first ccTLD - and a complex hierarchy under it, it's just not commonly used for historical reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us

Re:Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany by AnthonyMouse on Sunday March 04, 2018 @11:15AM (#16515190)
It's not commonly used because the hierarchy is weird. Originally the names had to be four deep, containing both the state and the locality, which is silly since all but the smallest operations span localities and even small companies often change locality. So they eventually allowed registrations directly at .us but there is still no .us equivalent to .org.uk.
Re:Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany by jhasse on Sunday March 04, 2018 @08:18AM (#16514601)
> The problem with allowing plaintiffs or prosecutors to play this game is that they can take the list of everything you've ever done, ignore everything that makes what they're trying to prove less likely and present only the list of things that make it more likely. If you look only at that evidence then each piece of it increases the probability that you believe what they want you to believe, regardless of whether it's actually true.

Isn't there a defence? I also don't believe the court would like to find out that the prosecutor lied.

Re:Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany by AnthonyMouse on Sunday March 04, 2018 @10:58AM (#16515120)
> Isn't there a defence?

There is, but it's a resource battle. Governments and large corporations can spend a hundred times more hours on something than regular individuals and small nonprofits. If they both had the same resources there might be a 90% chance the defendant wins, but create a large enough resource asymmetry and it flips the other way.

This is one of the main reasons for the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in criminal cases, but that doesn't apply to civil cases even when the plaintiff is 10,000 times the size of the defendant, and isn't enough in criminal cases where the defendant is relying on a criminally over-worked public defender and everything is greased to mass-produce guilty pleas and discourage trials.

> I also don't believe the court would like to find out that the prosecutor lied.

It isn't strictly lying, it's just not pointing out inconvenient facts.

Prosecutors can get into trouble for this when it's really damning, like not disclosing a witness who says it was somebody else, but that's separate from all the banality like the number of man hours they spent investigating you without finding anything before they could come up with what they're presenting.

Re:Project Gutenberg blocks access from Germany by jhasse on Sunday March 04, 2018 @06:30PM (#16517465)
I see, thanks for the explanation.