PiracyApologist's comments

PiracyApologist | 14 years ago | on: Judge: An IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Person (or BitTorrent Pirate)

Isn't this fact obvious to any hacker worth their salt? This doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity (per the guidelines). Flagged. Please keep these articles on Slashdot/Reddit.

PiracyApologist | 14 years ago | on: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

From the guidelines:

  "What to Submit
  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
  That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
  reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
  gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Clearly the community has spoken in submitting and then voting this up to be the #1 story on HN. However, I'm having a hard time finding what is intellectually gratifying about these kinds of articles other than in a Slashdot YRO-style basis where different people chime in on censorship, arguments over linking vs hosting, morality of piracy, etc.

Maybe having been a long-time Slashdot reader I've seen these arguments played out ad nauseum. When I started regularly participating in HN over a year ago I found HN to be refreshing in that these kinds of stories didn't make it to the front page. If anything, I'd expect a good hacker would find a blog post detailing lesser-known aspects of the bittorrent protocol interesting. Or a blog post discussing technical workarounds were such a block to be implemented. As I've been around long enough, I'm officially qualified to say that I'm saddened to see HN turning into Slashdot/Reddit.