Hacker News: mlissner

New comment by mlissner in "Astra for Law"

mlissner — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:54:28 +0000

We have hosted bulk case law at Free Law Project for over a decade: https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api/bulk-data

New comment by mlissner in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

mlissner — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 18:24:12 +0000

We’re familiar with vulnerability disclosure philosophies, but what if the problem can’t be fixed because there’s no forward secrecy for the hundreds of millions of documents that are already out there?

It’s tricky stuff and we have limited resources, unfortunately.

New comment by mlissner in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

mlissner — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:09:16 +0000

It’s a fine line. Most redactions are for the good, to protect someone or something. For example even in the Epstein files, where some redactions are being abused, most redactions are protecting victims.

If there’s a way to undo huge amounts of redactions, that’d certainly be a net negative. Sort of like if encryption were suddenly broken, you wouldn’t publish a paper saying so.

Our goal has always been to educate about the problem so that it can be addressed. We didn’t have resources to push on the font metrics approach, so we stayed mostly quiet about it.

New comment by mlissner in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

mlissner — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:53:44 +0000

Really depends on the length and predictability of the redaction, but yes. If it's short and contextually it's only likely to be either "yes" or "no", you've got it. If it's longer and could contain an unknown person's name along with some other words, well, that's harder.

New comment by mlissner in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

mlissner — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:50:50 +0000

No, we worked with researchers that developed that kind of system, but didn't broadcast our work b/c the research was too sensitive. Seems the cat is out the bag now though.

I think the combination of AI and font-metrics is going to be wild though. You ought to be able to make a system that can figure out likely words based on the unredacted ones and the redaction's size. I haven't seen any redaction system yet that protects against this.

New comment by mlissner in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

mlissner — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 23:03:44 +0000

Cool to see this here. It’s funny because we do so many huge, complex, multiyear projects at Free Law Project, but this is the most viral any of our work has ever gone!

Anyway, I made X-ray to analyze the millions of documents we have in CourtListener so that we can try to educate people about the issue.

The analysis was fun. We used S3 batch jobs to analyze millions of documents in a matter of minutes, but we haven’t done the hard part of looking at the results and reporting them out. One day.

New comment by mlissner in "Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser"

mlissner — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:37:15 +0000

OK, this is really neat: - S3 is really cheap static storage for files. - DuckDB is a database that uses S3 for its storage. - WASM lets you run binary (non-JS) code in your browser. - DuckDB-Wasm allows you to run a database in your browser.

Put all of that together, and you get a website that queries S3 with no backend at all. Amazing.

Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser

mlissner — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:37:15 +0000

Article URL: https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/10/24/rethinking-data-discovery-for-libraries-and-digital-humanities/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45774571

Points: 237

# Comments: 62

Firefox Profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

mlissner — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:15:52 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/profile-management/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580284

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Senator castigates federal judiciary for ignoring "basic cybersecurity"

mlissner — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 02:34:08 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/08/senator-to-supreme-court-justice-federal-court-hacks-threaten-us-security/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021672

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by mlissner in "Working on databases from prison"

mlissner — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:28:47 +0000

Maine's remote work program is an incredibly promising development to prevent recidivism. The amazing thing about it is that it gives real jobs to prisoners that they can seamlessly continue after they get out of prison. Normally when you get out, it's impossible to get a job, and the clock is ticking. This leads to desperation, which leads to bad behavior.

There is a real risk of exploitation, but if it's properly managed, remote work for prisoners is one of the most hopeful things I've heard about the prison system. It gives people purpose while there and an avenue to success once they're out.

New comment by mlissner in "FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado"

mlissner — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 17:19:17 +0000

OK, here's the first thing popping up in court about this. There's a motion to unseal search warrants filed by a security researcher at Stanford that was just filed:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69834044/in-re-motion-t...

This doesn't mean there are search warrants, necessarily, but this case might be the next place something pops up. If anybody wants to follow the case, you can do so with this link. :

https://www.courtlistener.com/alert/docket/new/?pacer_case_i...

New comment by mlissner in "FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado"

mlissner — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 03:05:26 +0000

I run CourtListener.com, which aggregates Pacer data.

So far nothing there, but I created an alert for his name, and I’ll post here and to Dan Goodin (the author of the article) if anything pops up.

New comment by mlissner in "Feds Link Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks"

mlissner — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 15:46:42 +0000

Just for the record, they are being sued to oblivion:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66607916/debt-cleanse-g...

You'd have to go study the case, but it's a class action case, so it'll hurt if they lose (and even if they don't). The court appears to be consolidating cases into this one, because LastPass has been sued in federal court 15 times so far:

https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=lastpass%20AND%20(caseName%...

Mozilla adding AI features to Firefox nightly

mlissner — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:20:45 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785872

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by mlissner in "Juriscraper Legal Scraping Toolkit"

mlissner — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 20:43:36 +0000

Wow, funny to see this here. I'm the director of Free Law Project. Juriscraper is a project we use to scrape and parse millions of court records. I'll be happy to answer any questions folks have about it.

It's on version 2.6.0 now, but it has had several hundred point releases over the years as we adapt to changing court websites. Fun stuff.

The result of using Juriscraper is that we have something like 200B tokens of court data that we make available in various ways: https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/bulk-data/

New comment by mlissner in "Ask HN: Looking for a project to volunteer on?"

mlissner — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 04:23:06 +0000

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS

Project names:

- Free Law Project

- RECAP Extension

- CourtListener.com

- Bots.law

Repos:

- https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener

- https://github.com/freelawproject/recap-chrome

- https://github.com/freelawproject/bigcases2/

Languages: Python, Django, JavaScript, Browser extensions

Free Law Project is a small non-profit that uses technology to make the legal sector better. We operate at a big scale (about 300M items in our DB and a lot of traffic), and need help scaling, operating, expanding, fixing, modernizing, and maintaining our stack.

One high priority project is adding a CDN to our site due to the crush we just got on the latest Epstein docs:

Background: https://www.axios.com/2024/01/04/epstein-document-crash-docu...

Issue: https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/issues/917

If you have experience in rolling out a CDN, that's great.

If not, we also have a volunteer backlog where we are always looking for help with our website, browser extensions, etc: https://github.com/orgs/freelawproject/projects/31/views/1

At this point, if you are a Python/Django/Browser extension dev, we could probably use your help!

Get in touch: info at free dot law

New comment by mlissner in "Judge rules Google trial documents can be posted by U.S. online"

mlissner — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 22:20:44 +0000

Lots. You can follow here: https://www.courtlistener.com/alert/docket/new/?pacer_case_i...

(I run CourtListener.)

New comment by mlissner in "Judge rules Google trial documents can be posted by U.S. online"

mlissner — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 22:17:56 +0000

I run CourtListener. Usually the problem is the opposite: It’s too hard to get things OUT of Google.

New comment by mlissner in "Twitter/Mastodon Bot from the Verge/Free Law Project to Follow Tech Cases"

mlissner — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 19:04:03 +0000

Hi HN. I'm the director of Free Law Project, the org that's behind this, RECAP, and CourtListener.com.

The idea of this project is to create topic-based bots that follow certain areas of the law so that folks can access the raw data underlying the news and read it for themselves.

We have a handful of "topic bots" over at https://bots.law, and we're working on Slack/MS Teams/Discord integration as well. We'll probably be launching a Crypto bot soon, if we can find a reasonable curator for that.

We'd love your thoughts and if you follow tech cases, hopefully you'll find our bots useful!