fbi contacts a guy who runs a free speech website asks who a particular shitposter is. free-speech guy hates the fbi but complies anyway (as best as he can), later finds out shitposter (who finally got arrested) was an actual commit-violence-against-you terrorist.
notice the incorrect conclusion he makes. the fbi emails him asking for info about a user, with a screenshot that includes a threat of violence. FSE guy jumps to the conclusion that it's just innocent braggadocio (despite the fact that another CEO was murdered just 6 months ago). jump to end of article: guy has already committed countless acts of violence (by proxy).
I'm glad that FSE guy engaged with the feds, but it shows dangerous bias when he sees a screenshot of a threat and immediately assumes that can't be a violent individual.
I personally think that the fact that violent people exist shouldn't diminish our values regarding privacy and/or anonymity. I don't think you should accommodate messages such as the one WitchKing shared...but I think if you value privacy, your priority should be removing the user and the content, and not appealing to the Feds. Don't make it a safe space for either party, because neither of them are on your side.
You doubt the seriousness of the Witch King of Angmar? The Pale King? The man leads a dark host of fell origin! He wears a ring of Power! His threats are clearly entirely credible, it is only a small step from posting on the Fediverse to a siege of the White City and the deaths of a multitude.
Yeah. For the life of me I don't see how someone could see a credible threat in that post. The man could actually murder Fink the same day and the post still wouldn't be evidence of a credible threat; it is just too silly. At best it is evidence he is deranged in addition to the trolling it turned out to be in this case.
That is a completely accurate description of that screenshot IMO. Even if the guy who posted it was making phone calls to get thugs to beat people up and hoping they'd take it further, that post is still clearly absurd, an obvious joke, not a credible threat. This is "96% of serial killers have used bread" stuff.
The problem is entirely that you cannot tell a baseless threat from a real one from just the forum post.
Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online threat component!
More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
So no, that screenshot is not "total weaksauce", for law enforcement. Hell, even here, that screenshot was demonstrably from a guy running a criminal enterprise!
> Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.
This isn't borderline though. This is blatantly nothing. You might as well arrest everyone who leaves their house in the morning.
> More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.
That doesn't make the legal system better, that makes it worse! What world do we live in where Pepsi can offer a valuable prize and welch on it and it's fine because they're joking, but it doesn't go the other way?
That's about the 2 week drug and alcohol budget for an average homeless person. Homeless means no permanent shelter, not "forbidden to acquire and use money"
This shouldn't be downvoted even though it is a jaded take. I think this is EXACTLY what is on full display from all sides in this thread (to the point that it should get probably get locked).
one common misconception is that "the downvote is not a disagree button". it absolutely is. I made that mistake before, in the early days of reddit they used to stress that mantra, and I made the false assumption it was true here. You are getting downvoted because people disagree or don't like what you have to say. simple as that.
Downvotes sadly are endorsed by pg (the owner of HN) for use to indicate disagreement.
Flags are not downvotes and are not to show disagreement. They do seem to get used that way.
I like the others above have show-flagged enabled. "90%" of things I vouch are things I disagree with that represent what I consider a point of view that deserves to be known, has been at least reasonably well presented, and isn't flame-bait.
I have the opposite problem: I want to simply render the pdfs so I can, you know, read them. not download them like they are data to be fed into another app.
I've been told this when trying FreeBSD in regards to freebsd ports. pkg generally works fine for me, but one day I tried to go off the beaten path and compile vim with some custom USE flags (I forget what they are called in freebsd) in the ports section. It pulled down 20+ dependencies and each `make menuconfig` kept asking me "would you like any of these options" I selected a few that seemed reasonable, and lo-and-behold, package 16 out of 23 fails because "this-requires-that and that-needs-Fubar3.32.1 and Fubar3 is deprecated for Fubar4" and I just gave up. I get that the Core OS devs can't support all 10k+ packages, but they should also be very clear that if you actually try to use them (i.e. enable custom features, not just compile stock code) there's a high chance they won't work. Another option would be to yank them from the ports list if they don't compile and require at least some standard, independently-produced build to succeed before they appear in portsnap fetch.
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