litchralee @ litchralee @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

IANAL either, but I'm vaguely familiar that this realm of USA law is known as "choice of law" provisions and the applicability of "click wrap" contracts, and it's a thorny issue in the digital age. Essentially, the problem is whether Meta can be made reasonably aware that a ToS exists for a given web server. Unlike a "NO TRESPASSING" sign posted on a gate, or a sticker on the packaging of a physical copy of Microsoft Word 97 that says "opening this package constitutes agreement to the EULA, at this URL...", it can be argued that unless the ToS is made so blitheringly obvious to a web scraper, it might not pass muster.

To be clear, this isn't a problem for normal web users, because the ToS link will very easily appear at the bottom of the page, when rendered in a standard web browser. The issue is whether scrapers -- including AI scrapers but also bot-crawlers and even plain ol Curl -- would see the notice of the ToS. There is no convention -- either de facto or in law -- about where or what format a ToS has to be. And it would be problematic to say that all scrapers need to thoroughly search a website for a "legal.txt", because such a file might be somewhere non-obvious and because it exacerbates the whole "scrap servers until they collapse" issue.

So already, getting a ToS to bind Meta -- or any other high-volume scraper -- is an upward battle. Hence why I suggested a remedy rooted in common law, premised on the idea that actively causing expenses for the server owner is actionable, even without a ToS.

That said, I do want to point out one other detail about choice-of-law: normally if a contract specifies the venue for disputes, that will be honored. Example: the courts of Santa Clara County in California. But supposing the instance owner lives in Montreal and specifies the venue as the Court of Quebec, and if the issue with binding Meta to the ToS was solved, then there's the challenge of actually targeting Meta. As a USA domiciled corporation, they're not automatically within the jurisdiction that the Quebec courts can reach. If there's a Canadian subsidiary, that might be a valid target. But if not, the Quebec courts wouldn't be able to compel Meta's lawyers to even show up, let alone rule in favor of the instance owner. And then there's the whole aspect of getting an American court to ratify a judgement issued by an overseas court. It's doable, but it's so much harder than specifying a venue within the USA.

But again, that's problematic if the instance isn't located within the USA, because then the owner must travel to the USA for their court dates. And I can't really recommend that anyone travel to the USA except for only the most critical or dire of situations.

I defer to any material or mechanical engineers, but it's honestly amazing how hardy the humble bicycle chain is, for all that's it's usually -- and unusually -- put through. It's basically some thin metal plates linked together by tiny roller bearings every few centimeters. Everything about it says it should explode into dozens of pieces under even light loading of human power

And yet it doesn't. Well, not until a few thousand peak Watts slams into it.

My personal theory is that bicycle components on ebikes begin to lose a substantial chunk of service life not simply because of the higher power demands, but because of the instantaneous force. Whereas a human generates force at two peaks when turning the cranks one whole revolution, a mid-drive motor generates and sustains torque -- and thus chain force -- with no pauses while accelerating. That's rough for the entire drivetrain, and maybe even parts of the frame. Though I'm of the opinion that the non-moving parts of a bicycle have so much excess strength that it's usually a non-issue.

I'd actually be more concerned about rear wheel construction, since standard-laced spoked wheels are incredible except for: 1) axial loading (aka pushing the wheel sideways), and 2) sudden and heavy torque, which threatens the trailing spokes. Over time, the fatigue to the spokes could manifest in a wheel failure.

Briefly setting aside the logical absurdity of separated bike lanes somehow only being beneficial to drug dealers and children and not anyone else, I find it farcical that the property on the right-side of the headline photo simultaneously has: 1) a message reading "no cycle lane", and 2) an advertisement that the property is available for rent.

Hmm, I wonder if maybe the property market would improve if more people could conveniently get to this location. If only there was something the local council could do which would promote an affordable, non-polluting, flexible, and high-volume means of transportation that strengthens the community and makes people more likely to visit and spend time on this street.

Nope, can't think of a solution, no sir.

Eccles pointed to state data showing 10 traffic-related deaths and 213 serious injuries from 2021 through 2024 in the area being considered for e-scooter restrictions — about two-thirds of which happened to people in cars, according to the Texas Department of Transportation's Crash Record Information System.

Once again, proponents of a ban seek to place the burden not on the majority cause of these collisions -- automobiles -- but on those who dare to achieve their mobility independence, who simply want affordable, flexible urban mobility in spite of the physical risks as well as municipalities that won't build appropriate infrastructure.

As of Monday afternoon, Glyderz's petition against an outright e-scooter ban had garnered more than 1,800 signatures.

Good on them! Hopefully someone takes this petition to the Houston City Council, not as though it's legally binding but as a tour-de-force of grassroot objections to what the City is doing. Even better is if even 1% of those signatories testified before the City Council about their objections during public comment. Even the most belligerent council cannot ignore 1.5 hours of constant negative comments on the same topic.

From my limited experience with PoE switches, how much power being drawn in relation to how much the switch can supply has a notable impact on efficiency. Specifically, when only one or two ports on a 48-port switch are delivering PoE, the increased AC power drawn from the wall is disproportionately high. Hence, any setup where you're using more of the PoE switch's potential power tends to increase overall efficiency.

My guess is that it has to do with efficiency curves that are only reasonable when heavily loaded for enterprise customers. In any case, if either of those two candidate switches meet your needs today and with some breathing room, both should be fine. I would tend to lean towards Netgear before TP-Link though, out of personal preference.

The larger town next to mine has monthly tours of their wastewater and water processing plants. Although they're scheduled to be amenable for K-12 student field trips, they also see adults who wish to understand how their tax dollars are being expensed for the public good.

For other municipal services, you might also reach out to the director of that department, since as public servants, they can also schedule special tours of the facilities for members of the public. It can't hurt to ask.

I've never had a need to use a Yubikey, but is that the button which spews gibberish into DMs? I've seen that a lot at work on Teams lol

It looks a lot like a Yubikey, which is used to securely authenticate to company resources like a VPN. Fortunately, unlike losing a hard drive, a Yubikey can be deauthorized by the company and thus the device becomes useless for malicious use.

So if you want to use that USB port for something else, it shouldn't be a problem to remove a Yubikey for the prior user's employer.

The cynicism surrounding the USA court system is not without cause, but the suggestion to not even bother trying has always rubbed me the wrong way. Firstly, on philosophical grounds, it's defeatism and on-par with appeasement. But secondly, average Americans can and have prevailed when up against a multinational company.

The one which often comes to mind is the case of a Philadelphia man winning a default judgement against Wells Fargo and was on the cusp of having the local sheriff auction off a branch's furniture, until they all settled the matter. The man in question wrote about his experience here: https://lawsintexas.com/this-is-how-my-qwr-foreclosed-wells-fargo/

As for how to use Meta, the average Joe need not hire a major law firm, but can choose to pursue a limited suit in small claims court. For Meta, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley in California, the Superior Court in Santa Clara County would be the venue. Drawbacks include: having to get to Silicon Valley for court dates, and a total claims limit of $12.5k.

But on the flip side, the small claims court does not allow lawyers to argue the case before the judge, meaning it's basically you and Meta's representative. That representative might still have legal training, but it won't be a situation like in the 1997 film The Rainmaker where it's one solo lawyer versus a whole team of lawyers.

There's also fewer avenues for Meta to inflate costs, such as attempting to pull the case into federal court: diversity jurisdiction isn't available unless a claim is over $75k. But they can create difficulties through the discovery process, and other pre-trial activities.

Do I think this is viable? Possibly, but it'll still take a fair amount of effort to have a lawyer work the case prior to trial, even if that lawyer can't actually do the talking in front of the judge. Easily 5 digit territory to pay your lawyer. But again, this is balanced by Meta having to deal with the nuisance of having someone on their side also put in a similar amount of effort. And when the max cap for small claims is $12.5k, Meta also has enough money to just pay up and then steer their AI scrapers away from your server, saving everyone the bother. See "nuisance value lawsuits". Also, spiteful lawsuits are a thing.

After all, it's not like everyone is going to sue Meta in small claims court, right? Right?

Very cool! That said, having started with motorbikes and then ebikes, I'd say they both certainly save on automobile maintenance but they have their own costs. Mostly up-front expenses like safety gear and training -- which I cannot stress enough for street riding motorbikes -- but then like any hobby, it climbs from there.

It might start with small aesthetic mods, and before you know it, you've got a lift, four different sets of tires, and are only using the car as a convenient place to store your three riding jackets for different occasions.

Two-wheels is a great journey!

In the somewhat-distant past, "trespass to chattels" is a type of lawsuit in Anglo-American law that could be raised in response to the abuse of a publicly-accessible computer system, originally meant as a remedy for the diminishment of someone's else's property (eg milking their cow). How the modern case law is understood, it allows the owner of a system (eg a Fediverse instance) to recover money due to a tortfeasor's (eg Meta) conduct that interferes with the normal function of the system. The bar had been raised since the 80s, requiring direct impact to the system, not just that someone accessed the system without explicit authorization. Even outright malice does not suffice, since the test is whether the system was degraded in some way.

A run-of-the-mill scraper querying once daily wouldn't meet the test, and something as minimal as an ICMP ping every second wouldn't meet the test. But AI scraping to the tune of hundreds of queries per day, adding up to double digit percentage points of server bandwidth for a small Fediverse instance, that might.

That some instance operators have to consider adding more vCPUs or RAM, or operators that successfully applied blockers like Anubis, in response to AI scraping underscores how harmful -- and thus potentially legally actionable -- those actions are, suggesting a decent chance such a lawsuit could be successful.

The link points to an advocacy group's discussion of the merits of the new pilot program, but for details of the rollout by RTD-Denver (Regional Transportation District), this article by local TV station ABC7 has that info: https://www.denver7.com/traffic/new-pilot-program-will-pay-for-first-mile-of-e-bike-e-scooter-trips-to-rtd-transit-stations

The summary is that RTD will spend some $120k over two years to support this idea, first pitched by a university student. The pilot will start sometime in 2026, for micro mobility trips that end at two designated LRT stations.

From the reporting, this only covers the first mile, such as one's home in the nearby suburbs to the University of Denver station. So it looks like the idea is to lower the barrier to getting into the transit system, to then access other destinations like the downtown or connecting to mainline rail services at Union Station. For the return trip, it doesn't seem like this program will cover the last mile from the station going back home. But human psychology is weird and people might be fine with this, since it's less logistically taxing on the return to just grab a scooter and head home.

Of course, for this program to be effective, scooters and ebikes have to be available in the catchment area surrounding both stations. This means operators need to make sure their equipment is distributed appropriately, or else potential transit riders might have to make a long trek just to get to a scooter, to then ride it to the transit station. But seeing as this is in the financial interest of operators, if the process is already in place, then this should happen automatically.

Can I expose webserver, SSH, WireGuard to the internet with reasonable safety?

Yes, yes, and yes. Though in all three cases, you would want to have some sort of filtering and IPS in place, like fail2ban or similar, at an absolute minimum. There are port scanners of all kinds scanning for vulnerable software that can be exploited. Some people suggest changing the port numbers away from the default, and while security through obscurity can be a valid tactic, it alone is not a layer of your security onion.

A reverse proxy plus tunnel is a reasonable default recommendation because it is easy and prevents a large class of low-effort attacks and exploits, but tunneling has its drawbacks such as adding a component that exists outside of your direct control. It is also not a panacea. Reverse proxying alone is also workable, as it means just one point of entry to reinforce with logging and blocking.

But I feel like if I cant open a port to the internet to host a webserver then the internet is no longer a free place and we're cooked.

The Internet is still (for now) a free place, but just like with free speech, effort must be expended to keep it free. The threats have increased and while other simpler options have arisen to fill demand for self hosting, this endeavor is about investing sufficient time and effort to keep it going.

In my estimation, it is no different then tending to a garden in the face of rising environmental calamities. You can and should do it, so long as you're fully informed about the effort required.

Some better reporting of the tentative settlement: https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2025/07/01/settlement-reached-shimano-defective-crankset-suit

But note that this is all subject to change, if the judge for the federal Central District of California does not approve the settlement as-is.

aren't these kind of laws; telling a maker to make the product in a specific way, eliminating creative freedom?

In the realms of monopoly regulation, product liability, energy efficiency, or pollution emissions, to name a few examples, the objective of the law is to define a floor (read: minimum requirements) that balance competing interests. In a democratic society, the government holds the public interest in high regard, but solely focusing on just that would lead to some very strange results, some of which are too philosophical to distill into practice.

Laws on anti-competitive or unfair business practices serve to level the playing field, so that businesses cannot assert an undue advantage over competitors, often to the hindrance of a competitive market for consumers. So there are two harms: other businesses have no hope of breaking into the market, and consumers don't get as many choices as they could have had. The fundamental idea is one of fairness.

The word "undue" is carrying a lot of weight, because some practices definitely assert an advantage to the disadvantage of everyone else: retaining all the good engineers is one such example, because good engineers can churn out good products, meaning other competitors have a harder time producing similarly-capable products. But that's not an unnatural advantage, unless somehow the deck is being stacked to produce that result (eg bribing universities to only send the good engineers to them).

As a practical matter, flouting the law is an excellent way to get one's products banned from the marketplace, either by mechanism of law or by alienating consumers. Take VW's emissions scandal as an example: US State DMVs were prepared to invalidate the vehicle registrations for noncompliant automobiles already on the road, and consumers fled for other automakers, causing both the used and new prices for VW cars to drop. Many (all?) US States prohibit the sale of automobiles currently subject to a recall, with penalties for the seller. So why would anyone want to continue owning such a car, nor could they even get rid of it except by getting/suing VW to buy it back.

When a government really wants to turn the screws on a nonconforming business, they absolutely have the means to do it. And it doesn't even require a top-down regime like what's often said about the Chinese government.

To be clear, this "uplifts vs e-bikes" framing is a false dilemma for many people; they provide different experiences. But while using your e-bike instead of the odd uplift day is unlikely to make it "carbon-neutral," using it to avoid driving easily could.

At last, some food-for-thought content that doesn't needlessly get couched with a BS clickbait title, and one which properly concludes on the pointlessness of the exercise. To be clear, I do enjoy efficiency calculations just like anyone else -- right? right?!?! -- but when it's used to justify the nebulous proposition of personal environmental impact while ignoring larger structural emissions, that's when it ceases to be actionable. And the author avoids this pitfall.

This article does not muddle the truth: the problem is not with ebikes, it is with cars. It always has been.

I got my hands on a cold oxygen plasma generator

My dude, very unique opportunities seem to be a common occurrence for you. I remember when I answered your question about 240v residential power. And now a plasma generator??

Sadly, I don't have an answer to your present inquiry, but I hope the other commenters are of aid.

There is something refreshing about how the Canadian legal system operates, when it comes to challenges against the government. Compare this to, say, the USA and it's breathtaking how thorough the judge wrote his opinion.

The first observation is that the judge breaks down the judgement into individual sections, some commonplace in American judgements and some not-so-common. A restatements of the relevant background is expected, but a thorough discussion for each piece of evidence/testimony introduced would have American jurists reeling. That level of detail normally is only articulated at appeals-level courts. But maybe that's normal in Canada because appeals are not necessarily automatic like they are in the USA; I understand that Canadian appeals require seeking permission (aka "leave" from the judge) to submit an appeal for the upper-court to hear, or the upper-court must be sufficiently interested to want to hear it at all.

Another difference is apparently the standard for "mootness". In the USA, stemming from the Case and Controversy clause in the federal constitution, judicial power is foreclosed when fully adjudicating the case at hand would not actually yield any different result. Whereas it seems that in Canada, there is more authority for a court to hear a case, if it originally started as a live controversy but resolving the core matter would clear the air, even though the present matter might not necessarily be any different. That is to say, Canadian courts retain discretion to continue a case, whereas American courts have to drop a case once mootness is found.

Finally, the judge in this case has no qualms calling out the government's proferred experts for their notable omissions, contrary opinions to everyone else in the field, or when the expert's testimony actually bolsters the supposition that bike lane removal will cause harms or won't reduce roadway congestion. American judges sometimes like to "split the difference" when it comes to expert testimony, but when it comes to rights of great import, that's like trying to split a baby. A supposed expert may not gallivant into court, spew anecdata, and be admitted to the same degree as all other experts who have testified to the contrary and came with srudies and citations. The section where the judge analyzes the evidence/testimony for undue bias is particularly apt.

Overall, the ruling seems well-supported in showing that the law's execution necessarily implicates the Canadian Charter, by being arbitrary about who should be free of bodily injury and who shouldn't. That said, the ruling is also quite narrow, only limited to the three separated bike paths in question. But this is likely because the complaint only went after the more egregious, most overturn-able part of the provincial law. The remaining provisions such as requiring Ministry approval for future bike lanes that displace motor vehicles lanes would continue to apply. But likely, those provisions can be litigated after the Ministry issues its first such denial.

It should also be noted that the case turned quite heavily on the separated nature of the three bike paths. The judge specifically contrasted evidence of typical bike lanes against those which have physical barriers and protections. Thus, subsequent cases involving the removal of painted bike lanes are not guaranteed to have as easy of a time in court.

Finally, as another procedural difference to America, the Canadian process for seeking an interlocutory injunction (USA: preliminary injunction) seems to move quicker. Though this might have to do with the obvious "balance of equities" problem, since if the province could quickly destroy the bike lanes before the court hears the matter, then that's a lot of waste if it turns out the law was bad. Meanwhile, the USA federal judiciary seems to be gutting the notion of any sort of balancing, blindly giving benefit of doubt to the federal government's most far-fetched legal claims of power. But I digress.

Is there anything legally stopping you from making your town think you're a gangster who robbed a bank and somehow got away with it?

If the goal is to convince other people to think you're a bank robber, but without actually having to rob a bank, I think it could be done with much less effort and likely more effective. But this then gets into the ethical line between little white lies and outright deception or misinformation.

Because one way to achieve that goal is to doctor a bunch of evidence that would "incriminate" yourself, such as AI-generated video, then disseminate that to local reporter s, while also plastering it on social media using astroturf accounts, and might as well stuff a copy into a manila envelope and mail to the local District Attorney.

And all of that is probably legal in most jurisdictions in the USA, with the probable sole exception of intentionally wasting the prosecutor's office's effort, since they had not solicited such evidence. Compare this to "tip lines", which expressly seek info and they are fully cognizant that not all the tips will be good.

There is exactly one nice thing I can say about the USA rail system, and it kinda underscores essentially every issue we have with the rails today: the privately-owned railroads are absurdly good at moving freight.

If we were to ignore the entire notion of using trains to move passengers, then suddenly the American railroads are remarkable in how much tonnage they can move over across the continent, even with their horrifically skeletal network, and still achieve the highest energy efficiency for land transport. They really shouldn't be as successful as they are, given that they have unionized labor, are not exempt from federal emissions regulations, and serve huge tracts of the country using only single-track lines dating back to the 19th Century.

To say that they've devoted all of their efforts to making freight work is an understatement. And it is from this foundation that all other uses of the rails are incompatible. And it shows.

The national passenger operator, when seeking to (re)start a line somewhere, must negotiate with host railroads -- except when Amtrak owns the tracks, such as in New England -- and that's primarily a matter of paying for time on the track, plus the "inconvenience" of regular schedule services when most freight doesn't really need to follow a schedule at all.

Unlike any other product or service, there is no eminent domain at the state-level for access to a railroad, so if a small public transit operator is rebuffed by the host railroad in their area, then that's basically it. Only Amtrak has a right to use eminent domain for railroads, and that's only ever been used once, resulting in a 20 year lawsuit to settle the matter at great cost.

Query whether a wealthy state like California or Texas can make a market-rate offer to outright buy the rail network within their state. I imagine the answer is yes, though this would have been much more useful if the idea came up when Southern Pacific was having their difficulties in the 1990s. Further query whether a state-owned railroad located in multiple states can unilaterally deny access to all other states -- like what the private railroads can do. Who knows.