Because he knew in advance that he would be crossing the border. If your threat model includes ensuring that US border control does not view the contents of your phone, and you're returning to the US after an international flight, then you need to take appropriate precautions (i.e. wiping your phone beforehand rather than after they've taken it). It's not like the police suddenly raided his house in the middle of the night. Obviously I feel bad for the guy, but if he had acted differently he would not have been criminally charged.

In general read-out protection only prevents the most casual of hobbyists from getting your firmware. Anyone who thought otherwise even pre-AI doesn't know what they're doing. It's sort of like how blu-ray copy protection only prevents people who don't know about MakeMKV from copying their discs, or how HDCP only prevents people who can't find a $20 HDCP terminating HDMI splitter from capturing the protected video.

Where did you see that? I found this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2885717/#:~:text=20... which says that in 1790, a 20 year old American white male could expect to live to his early 60s. Interestingly, life expectancy in the US actually went down during the 19th century due to urbanization. One thing you have to watch out when you're looking at numbers like this is that they catalog remaining life expectancy. For example, the chart says "41.4" but you have to add 20 to get the total life expectancy since it's remaining lifespan at age 20.

> For years, decompilation communities attempted to establish that decompilation is primarily for research: we love these games and want to understand how they work, and to uncover the mysteries that the original developers left behind. That's not to say that ports aren't fun too; they're just not the sole reason a decompilation exists. Sloptubers and subreddits like /r/decomps have done immense damage here, freely using "decomp" to mean "PC port".

Historically decompilations were made for the benefit of other programmers. The binary code was transformed into source code, which made it easier for the game's community to understand how the game works. AI has dramatically increased the speed of producing a decompilation, and it can just straight up answer any question you have just by looking at the binary, so it kind of kills the community aspect. Now everyone has immediate access to every aspect of how a game works, so there's no point in seeking anyone else out.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50079980

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

In general any idea that international law is relevant except as a tool for the West to provide moral justification for its actions when it's convenient to do so is naive. At least the Trump administration being more vulgar and crude in expressing its disregard for international law compared to previous administrations may open more people's eyes.

> As I mentioned elsewhere, I agree that when I'm first watching a movie, I want to get straight to the film and not be distracted and slowed down by a bunch of crap. But the interactivity comes into play for repeat viewing where the user wants to dig deeper into the content.

> Let me clarify what I mean by scaling the movie. Lets say you are a big fan of a movie and you are watching it with some of the special features turned on, like picture in picture director commentary with pop-up factoids. On HD-DVD we could shrink the movie down to say 1/4th of the screen and have all sorts of associated content popping up around it, like storyboards, artwork, film facts, etc. All done at the authoring level. Some of the more advanced blu-rays are starting to figure out how to do some of this on the latest firmware players, but it's complicated and not fully compatible with players. However on HD-DVD that was a spec compliant feature from the beginning.

Personally I disagree with him about HD-DVD being the better format, simply because of the better storage capacity and bitrate allowed by Blu-Ray (as well as how a growing number of HD-DVDs are dying now). However, the interactivity is a pretty interesting idea.

There's a good Reddit comment here from someone who worked on authoring Blu-Rays that explains why this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vdrbr/hey_reddit_its...

Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.