

Fork the Law - Pyrrhuloxia
http://forkthelaw.org

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mapt
This needs a discussion medium more sophisticated than inline highlight
comments.

For example: It is my contention that criminalizing noncommercial DOS attempts
is highly inappropriate. They are a very good analogue for protected speech in
the form of traditional protest picketing, trying to temporarily drown out and
deny painless access. So long as an individual is only committing their own
bandwidth to a pingstorm, this seems to me like something that should be
handled as a tort. Torts have Constitutionally-limited punitive damages of ~9x
demonstrated damages, fractionally allocated to the participants. A hundred
thousand 4channers should damn well be able to pingstorm the Westboro Baptist
Church's closet server into temporary unavailability.

Botnet-driven DDOS ordered by one person are very different beasts because
they can have such a disproportionate impact, because they can be utilized for
commercial goals, because they're operating from hijacked hardware, and
because rent-a-botnet is common & thus more likely to ask for returns rather
than be an expression of speech.

How would I go about making this change based upon consensus though?

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mapt
It would also be useful, at least for me, to present the indentations implied
by the outline-style lettering of bill-writing.

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maradydd
That's a high-priority forthcoming CSS fix, you just bumped it higher. Thanks.

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Pyrrhuloxia
Whole-heartedly agree with what they are trying to do, but I wish they were
using a git repo rather than a text control that requires you to be online.

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maradydd
forkthelaw.org dev here. What you're seeing now is a weekend prototype using
banged-together open-source projects, focused on a UI experience for people
more on the tech-law end of the spectrum (the Jennifer Granicks and Cathy
Elliott Joneses of the world -- in fact, Cathy's helping us out with alpha
testing). It's also specifically focused on the CFAA for timing reasons: in
just under three weeks, I and a whole bunch of my infosec colleagues will be
in DC for ShmooCon, so we can all go visit our representatives while we're in
the area anyway.

Over the next few days we'll be building out the site with more information
about the upcoming ShmooCon lobbying trip as well as our feature roadmap. The
short version is that we'll be pulling the entire United States Code into
darcs, updating it via GovTrack's APIs, and providing a UI to select and fork
specific sections of the law for people to collaboratively work on.

The site's going to change quickly in the coming weeks as we add more
functionality. Maybe we shouldn't have launched _quite_ this early, but there
is a bit of a time crunch.

Edit: IAC, if you're interested in more DVCS-like, offline/command-line
functionality, I'm totally down to support that. Tell me more about how you'd
expect to interact with that?

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Pyrrhuloxia
Totally understandable if it makes the most sense for the people you see as
your primary customers for this.

Out of curiosity, did this come out of the aaronsw Hackathon at Noisebridge
this weekend?

[wish i had been able to make it there, but was unable]

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maradydd
Basically the way I view it is like this: we know that lawyers and hackers
only have some overlapping domain expertise, but we'll need to work together
in order to achieve good tech law reform and everyone's going to have to get
out of their comfort zone to some extent. Whatever markup tool we deliver, a
wide range of lawyers should be able to find it not too hard to use; hackers
will be more unforgiving about a UI that has, say, latency issues ( _guilty
look_ ), but a good UI shouldn't have those anyway. Finding the right balance
of user needs to satisfy with the resources we have available is of course
going to be an ongoing process, so we're just gonna have to keep an active ear
out for what people are asking for.

It sort of dovetailed with the aaronsw Noisebridge hackathon, but we started
hacking on it independently about a day before. Christie, who's a Noisebridge
member, realised the hackathon would be a good place to present it, and did.
Via that, we met the <http://hypothes.is/> guys, and things have continued to
snowball from there :)

